Over 75 years after the government first commissioned posters to showcase the country’s most stunning natural features under the banner: “See America,” The Creative Action Network (CAN) has set out to do it again by launching a new version of See America, a crowdsourced art campaign, enlisting artists from all 50 states to create a collection of artwork celebrating our national parks and other treasured sites. The campaign will kick off with an exhibition in the William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York on January 10, 2014.
Crowdsourcing has come to represent everything unethical about working with creative people. It is almost always synonymous with spec-work, or contests where everyone is making work for free hoping to be named the winner and receive the fabulous prize. Sadly, by design, 99% of the entrants will be labeled losers and the contest organizer will get to chose from a big pool of work that they didn’t have to pay for.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to ethically work with a big, group of creative people. I’d like to talk about how and why to do this.
Every great book deserves a great cover. Sadly, many of the greatest classics in the public domain are left with poorly designed or autogenerated covers that fail to capture what makes these books exciting, inspiring, and lasting.
