Alexia Blogs

So, I wrote a post yesterday about how licensing content as Creative Commons is good thing. Robert also had a piece about how rights holders ought to think seriously about sharing before they license their work as Creative Commons. My stance hasn’t changed a bit. Sharing is good. I won’t demean the intelligence of rights holders by telling them what to share and what not to share. We all draw the limit somewhere. Knowing where that limit is and sharing still, benefits everyone.

Or does it? I find that some web designers revile Creative Commons, instead of celebrating it. Why? Because some view it (wrongly) as a disruptive force in their business model. Community sharing of graphics and themes is like landing a tonne of pile of bricks outside someone’s house when they want to build an extension. Yes, the raw materials are there, but some serious planning, designing and building needs to be executed. Done with taste and skill. That’s where web designers pop in. The site isn’t a product, rather it’s a side-effect of a web design service. What does it say about the skill-level of a web designer who is scared of Creative Commons? If their business is threatened by the proliferation of free site content, not much. And just to be clear, I speak specifically here on Creative Commons content that is licensed for usage in commercial products.

Wouldn’t clients that dabbled in the past with Creative Commons solutions and have reassessed the professionalism of their web presence, find it much easier to sign-off on improving it by employing web designers? The psychological barrier to entry is lower for them. Good design is not seen as a money-pit, rather as a tangible benefit to their branding story. More business for good designers and great sites for clients. Bad designers sulk in the corner.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 8:47 am and is filed under Blogging, Geekery, Irish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.