Illustration of a magnifying glass

12 Apr 2017

The monthly Snook logo hack

Every month, a member of our team hacks the Snook logo into something fun. This month, it was Sarah’s turn to hack it. And here’s what she did.


Every month, a member of our team hacks the Snook logo into something fun. Previously, it has been linked with current news, internal events, or had a personalised touch. There are no strict rules about it – it’s a little fun tradition started at our monthly Show n Not Tell events. So far, it has included doge, a bikini emoji when Eve was going on holiday, a wedding ring when Sarah got engaged, and a glasses cutout – placed on a cat. This month, it was Sarah’s turn to hack it. And here’s the story of what she did.

Hacked in Bangladesh

I’m pretty busy so I didn’t hack the logo myself. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t have one – I just delegated it… to Bangladesh.

On a more serious note, I went to a conference in New York last year about Mechanical Turks, cooperatives, and the internet. It was also about how the freelance and design world is changing – questioning the values of work, ownership, and principles of equality. Since then, I’ve been wanting to know more about it. With the monthly logo hack being a good opportunity for this exploration, I set off to find out what the freelance market was about. I had a quick look at all the platforms before I went on a website for freelancers and tried to give a description of what we mean by ‘hacking’ our logo.

Screenshot of our original job ad

The logo hack job ad

I posted the above and within 3 minutes I had 26 people who were willing to hack the logo for us. I had quite a long chat with one person but then found out she wasn’t interested in hacking – she wanted to make a new logo.

But then I met ‘Wonpshaw2020’ and, like the name suggests, he’s from the future.

He offered the lowest price: $12 per hour. I did this on Wednesday night so we went back and forth around understanding what ‘logo hack’ means. It was around 4 a.m. in Bangladesh and he was working all hours (I actually think there are three of him…). After a wee while, we got this!

Logo Hack - Version 1

 

However, I gave some feedback… I said I liked it and asked whether we could get a background to it. We got two more versions, but we can’t share them due to copyright laws – one of them involving the faces of two rabbits through the two ‘O’s. Here’s a copyright-free adaptation of the other version:  

Logo Hack - Version 2

After we got a good laugh as a team, it was time to reflect and think about the wider picture of freelance work.

The freelance pay

I felt really strange about paying such a low price for someone doing this work. I gave him a 5-star review and he sent me a photo of him – we actually became friends. Afterwards, I did some maths. I wanted to know how much this job was worth to him in Bangladesh. How much would the $12 equate to his average salary?

The average wage for a graphic designer per month in Bangladeshi Taka (BDT) is 20,000 which equates to £198 per month. So that’s just under £2,400 per annum for a salary in Bangladesh, if you were working there. What we paid him to do was £9.62 in total for about 10 minutes work, let’s round it up to an hour. This equivalently means we paid him at a rate of about £77 a day – so that was a good gig for him. I feel much better about that.

 

However, this isn’t a usual gig for him. And it’s not sustainable.

Picking back up from the conference I went to last year, it highlights that we should be asking questions around how the ‘gig economy’ works.

‘What does this mean for the wider gig economy and people’s security for the future? If the income is not sustainable, then what? If people get sick, then what?’

‘What does this mean for the design industry and standards in place to ensure a quality of work is undertaken and it doesn’t infringe on IP?’

If you’re interested in people discussing this or thinking about this more widely, check out Platform Cooperativism.

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So, that was my logo hack… It was more of a story, really. I’m not asking everyone to freelance out our work going forwards, but for this purpose it was ideal!

Want to be next month's logo hacker?

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