Over the last several months I’ve become a frequent lurker and sometimes participant at the Center for Church Communication Labs. You see, when it comes to serious graphic design I’m a total hack. I’m just learning how to do stuff and occasionally I like to take one of my ideas and throw it into the Lion’s Den to see if anything I do meets their criteria.
This hack gets a lot of great ideas and inspiration from the labs, it’s great!
The problem? Some designers are total jerks!
There is a reason why God made some people to sit behind their desks and play on PhotoShop and Illustrator all day. It’s because they have zero people skills.
Just the other day I posted something I’ve been working on for church. I stated right up front… my idea stunk but then I saw something I really liked here in the labs… I copied it. I gave credit for it then I went to great lengths to say that I harvested the idea from the labs and used it for my own uses. Trust me, I’ve gotten the "copyright" lecture more than one time at the labs and I’ve read the rant a bunch of times from people who must have sat on their Macbooks or something. (Flat out grumps!) My point in putting stuff on the labs is to take something in development and ask for feedback and allow it to genesis to something that is more unique. (Collaboration!)
Know this, when I put this image on the labs I knew full-well it would get attacked. In a way, I just wanted to bring the debate to new light… see more below.
Well, within an hour some professional designer posts this long lecture about how what I did was wrong and I didn’t follow his rule and that I should be ashamed of myself. "Jesus doesn’t like thieves." (REally said that) Yada yada yada. I mean really… art is really the process of taking someone else’s ideas to the next level. I’ve been around the block enough times to see that there is a difference between taking someone’s idea to a different level and just copying it for your own benefit. And clearly I took that persons idea and played with it. What I posted was almost exactly like the original and I got ripped big time! No mercy, no grace, no teaching me a better way. Just flat out blasted!
What’s this got to do with online communities?
One of the things I like to do is be a newbie in online communities. It actually teaches me what it must feel like to be a newbie at YMX. Each time I’m treated like a child or written off like the village idiot at some online community… it makes me never want to go back there again. Further, it pains me to see stuff like that happen on Youth Ministry Exchange. People come to YMX to get encouraged or to blow off steam or to just seek some advice and when someone treats them like crap (even just telling them to search the forums instead of searching the forums for them and linking to it) I wonder if that person will ever come back. This is also the exact reason I have a zero tolerance policy for existing members bullying people with just 1-20 posts… it irks me to know end because I know how it feels to honestly make a mistake but still need help!
I’m a self-declared hack when it comes to creativity. Very rarely can I come up with something from scratch and actually make it work. But generally I’m taking an idea I got from somewhere else and tweaking it. And I think that as the world changes… every job is going to have to deal with a matrix that looks like this.
Job 1.0 = I own the work. My expertise makes me valuable and I have to protect it.
Job 2.0 = No one owns my work. My expertise is made valuable when I let it go and help people make it better.
For as forward thinking and trendy as artists are… there are clearly some who don’t get this idea. Collaboration isn’t a threat to creativity. Collaboration is what takes creativity from an individual and unleashes it. This makes business better. This makes education better. This simple idea is the driving force
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