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Carl Alvian's latest post on Coroflot's Creative Seeds Blog takes on the question of design competitions, and it's a must read for all designers. Here's our favorite passage:

If you're in it for the money, you're doing it for the wrong reason. While there are some pretty good prizes out there (Dell is offering $25,000 to the overall Re-Generation winner), the real benefits of a good contest are available to all entrants. The trick is not to view it as an employment opportunity, because it's not; it's a professional development and marketing tool.

If designing for a competition were the same as designing for a client, the payoff would be poor indeed. But in many ways a well-designed competition is like The Best Client Ever. Think about the characteristics of a Bad Client:

::Non-specific and constantly shifting deadlines.
::Frequent changes in project scope.
::"I know it when I see it" design requirements.
::Wants you to do something just like you did for another client four months ago.

A Bad Client offers too little information when you most need it--at the beginning--and starts making changes when you can least afford it--at the end.

A good design competition is the opposite of all these things. It starts with a clear, concise statement of constraints, target market, manufacturability requirements, and expected deliverables, all before you even agree to start working. It tells you exactly when results are due. It will never ever call you three months into the project to say the production budget's been cut by 30%. It has no idea what you've designed in the past nor does it care, so you're free to knock yourself off, or knock yourself out with a totally new direction. And if you blow it, nobody gets mad at you, and your professional reputation remains intact.

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