British designers are concerned about competition from universities

British design associations are sounding the alarm: due to competition from universities, professional designers are left without work.

Many designers complain about the hard life, customers ordering design sites from students and blame on “civilized” countries, where everything seems to be wrong, but much better. Say there customers are educated, non-greedy, they understand that you need to order work from professionals, etc. In general, not the designer’s life, but raspberry :)


However, this opinion is not entirely true, moreover, our colleagues in Britain have even harder. If Ukrainian and Russian design companies have to compete for low-budget orders with the so-called. “Hungry students” that would make any web site for 50/100/500 uev, it’s still worse in the UK (for design studios).

In addition to similar competition in the low-budget sector, to which, in general, everyone is accustomed, British studios have recently had to compete in the struggle for more profitable orders, but not with individual students or self-educated teams, but directly with universities that offer development quite complex projects in the field of design (industrial, web, multimedia) for a nominal fee or for nothing. “Why such generosity?” You ask. The fact is that universities receive funding from the state or charitable foundations, which they use to develop educational projects of their students. At the same time, unlike our universities, they strive to implement real projects for real customers, so that graduates really have practical work experience. As a rule, universities try to find these projects in organizations from their own region, and in order to make their proposal risk-free they offer to work for nothing or for ridiculous money. They can afford it, because have allocated for this state or sponsorship financing. As a result, local design companies lose orders because Naturally, customers do not mind getting a design project for free or very cheap. Among other things, this, by the way, leads to such an effect as problems with the employment of university graduates, studios that have received less orders because of competition with universities do not expand their staff and cannot take on new employees.
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Associations of designers in Britain rightly consider such competition not entirely fair and try to influence universities through supervisory authorities. How it will end is still unknown.

Personally, in my opinion, universities should develop educational projects through sponsoring local design studios, on the terms of attracting students to real projects. In this way, they would also be acquainted with potential employers.

Original in our corporate blog

Update. As I understand it, many people have such an opinion that it’s just that in Britain they are crap designers, just concerned about the competition from the students. Type need to work better and customers will reach out to you. In my opinion there is, however, a big difference between the 2 situations:
- Jones student comes to the client company without any work experience and says that I will do the project 10 times cheaper than Horns & Hoofs studio
- Professor Dr. Dr. Jones, the laureate ..., the author ... and says that the project can be made by a group of his students, under his strict guidance and also 10 times cheaper or completely free. Moreover, for all that, the work of the professor and his student group is really not free (it is free or almost free for the customer only), and is financed by taxpayers, i.e. including and the studio "Horns & Hoofs"

In the first case, the competition is quite healthy, the service from a less qualified, inexperienced contractor is fairly cheap and the customer chooses either to get a normal quality for good money or take a risk and get an incomprehensible quality for little money.
In the case of a group of students under the guidance of a professor (we believe that he is a subject matter expert), the customer’s risks of getting a completely low-quality product are much lower, and the price remains zero or very low, and not at the expense of healthy competition, optimization of business processes, etc. p., but at the expense of subsidies.