Canva

[William Overington]

7 hours ago, pixelstuff said:

In general, ideas aren't worth much unless they also come with a blueprint on how to build them. 

Possibly, in general.

Yet an idea can sometimes have a Columbus Egg aspect to it. Maybe something that later on some people say is obvious, yet nobody else had thought of it before being shown how to do it by the person who put forward the idea.

The blueprint that you mention could be a large item with lots of detail, or it might be quite short but causes people to realize a possibility which had not occured to them before.

So such a Columbus Egg idea can lead to significant progress even if it can be stated in a short document.

A parallel is with a designer who is asked to design a logo for a new product, say sportswear. The designer listens to the directors of the sportswear business as they make their ten minute presentation of their needs, then the designer takes ten minutes, using Affinity Designer, to design a finished logo for them, that logo to be iadvertisements and on thousands and thousands of the sportswear items. How much should the designer be paid?

William

 

Edited April 10 by William Overington
Correcting spelling errors that Alfred points out in the next post in this thread.

[Alfred]

16 minutes ago, William Overington said:

The designer listens to the directors of the sportsware business as they make there ten minute presentation of their needs

<off-topic>
A superb example of “spell check won’t save you”!
</off-topic>

(Well, it should have highlighted “sportsware”.)

[Rodi]

22 hours ago, Alfred said:

Does that mean you’re out of print now?

I COULD ONLY WISH!!!!

What does one do to get thrown off/out of the typesetting industry (or, indeed, any industry)? 

In fact the whole industry was no more by 1995. So from 1992-1998 I had no job within the graphic arts industry. I still use many elements of those days. I do really miss the strength of that industry with proof readers, quality of fonts and cool equipment. Our camera department  had distortion cameras and platen devices to distort type. We used punches to knock type out of black elements. Our typesetting equipment did some cool things, but essentially we did type that could be laid down on a mechanical easily for artists, they paid for that. We sent glassine copies (see through 16#, iirc) of the type for them to overlay before they commited to spray/wax the galleys to put on the boards.

[William Overington]

15 minutes ago, Alfred said:

<off-topic>
A superb example of “spell check won’t save you”!
</off-topic>

(Well, it should have highlighted “sportsware”.)

Possibly! 😁

William

 

 

[Chills]

35 minutes ago, Alfred said:

<off-topic>
A superb example of “spell check won’t save you”!
</off-topic>

(Well, it should have highlighted “sportsware”.)

That's why you need a spilling and grimmer chocker.

[William Overington]

Perhaps sportsware is things like footballs and hockey sticks and cricket bats.

Yet @Alfred seems to assume that I had used a spellchecker, which is most courteous of him, yet alas I had not done so!

William

 

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

footballs

Firmware!

3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

hockey sticks and cricket bats

Hardware!!

[Alfred]

11 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Yet @Alfred seems to assume that I had used a spellchecker, which is most courteous of him, yet alas I had not done so!

Doesn’t your broswer invoke a spill chucker automagically?

[Return]

3 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Doesn’t your broswer invoke a spill chucker automagically?

My browser spellchecker function can also use AI now.😶

Quoting it/her/him/they gives:
"The spellchecker in my internet browser now uses AI (artificial intelligence) to check my spelling"

 

[William Overington]

26 minutes ago, Return said:

My browser spellchecker function can also use AI now.😶

Quoting it/her/him/they gives:
"The spellchecker in my internet browser now uses AI (artificial intelligence) to check my spelling"

 

39 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Doesn’t your broswer invoke a spill chucker automagically?

 

If it does, I am not aware of that.

William

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Well, large amounts of money have been paid for Affinity.

Which has nothing to do with it. To my knowledge, no company pays for nothing more than ideas its customers have submitted.

[Old Bruce]

Perhaps I should be charged for the R&D costs of implementing my idea until it starts making money, and then I get a farthing for each copy sold. Less the costs of fixing bugs caused by it.

[William Overington]

5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Perhaps I should be charged for the R&D costs of implementing my idea until it starts making money, and then I get a farthing for each copy sold. Less the costs of fixing bugs caused by it.

No, management must manage and management can assess the idea and decide whether, at its own expense, to try to implement the idea, or whether not to try to implement the idea.

Certainly there can be well known issues in the management of new ideas, such as Not Invented Here.

Yet, often contrary to popular belief, many managements know the value of intellectual property and of good ideas.

How much for each copy sold the originator of the idea gets can depend on the value of the idea to the company. Perhaps an upfront payment and then 1p per copy sold, perhaps 10p per copy sold.

So although there has been laughter (though not from Old Bruce, to whose post I am replying) over me raising the issue of payment for ideas that are accepted and implemented in Affinity products, that does not mean that such payments will not be made, though it does not mean that such payments will be made either.

I am hoping that Ash will respond to my enquiry please.

William

 

[Old Bruce]

Let us say I come up with a truly brilliant idea and post it here. Affinity decides to run with it and agree to pay me a penny a copy once they implement it. All good. Oh no. People from Adobe and Quark are reading this forum. They have stolen my idea. They are using it and not paying me.

If or when Affinity includes a raster to vector tracing tool or command who should get the money? Several people have suggested it. Same for true Vector brushes and also for a Digital Asset Manager. Autoflowing Tables in Publisher.

Over the years I have given away song lyrics and comedy routines to people who could use them. If I wanted to get paid I would say so before I offered up the lyrics or routines. And I've gotten paid gigs just by saying "I can fix that, but it'll cost you." Your best bet is to take your idea and write it out and set up meetings with several software companies.

In closing there is the, probably apocryphal, story about a movie studio executive who paid Orson Welles for his latest great idea for a movie. The executive's friends pointed out that he had just paid money for Macbeth.

[wonderings]

6 hours ago, William Overington said:

Well, large amounts of money have been paid for Affinity.

If Affinity makes money from implementing ideas from its customers, then it seems reasonable that those who suggested the ideas are given some of that money.

What other companies have done before is one thing, this question is about Affinity and the future.

I should have included @Ash in the post when I asked the questions. The questions as follows.

So @Ash what are the official Affinity and Canva  answers to these questions please?

William

 

Does any company operate this way? The mess it would create if they did this would be astronomical. First, what if you were not actually the first person to post the idea, but were the first post noticed. Royalties, are you getting paid one time or forever with each sale, because they are making money with each sale and if your idea is implemented it is constantly earning money. How do you prove the idea was originally yours and not internal or you saw it in another app and requested it for this app. So Photoshop has a feature you like that is not in Affinity, you recommend this feature and it gets implemented. Do you get paid or does Adobe get paid because they are using what they have?

I am guessing for my first question, that no companies operate this way from external sources. 

 

[henryanthony]

To me, it would be naive to think that a modern software company would not be monitoring their user base in numerous ways in order to better manage their products. While I have not explored this in any detail, Adobe Experience League Community seems to be one of the ways Adobe manages suggestions from software users at large. I believe I have also read that any ideas received through forums are the property of Adobe, or something like that. You can also bet that Adobe has policies around handling of any possible circumstances including any payments. I have no idea - and don't really care - what the policy of Affinity or Canva is regarding to what they do with customer data and suggestions. I can imagine that many people suggest the same features be added. How would that be handled? Sounds like a can of worms that will not benefit me to open. 

[pixelstuff]

6 hours ago, William Overington said:

A parallel is with a designer who is asked to design a logo for a new product, say sportswear. The designer listens to the directors of the sportswear business as they make their ten minute presentation of their needs, then the designer takes ten minutes, using Affinity Designer, to design a finished logo for them, that logo to be iadvertisements and on thousands and thousands of the sportswear items. How much should the designer be paid?

 

What you described is an example where the designer did all the work to make the idea from the sportswear business (a logo that communicates such and such) become a reality. Likewise Affinity is doing all the work to implement a user idea from the forums like the logo designer did. The sportwear business paid the logo designer and forum users are paying Affinity.

For your parallel to match up with Affinity paying for ideas, the logo designer should be paying the sportswear business for their idea. That would be silly.

[William Overington]

45 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Let us say I come up with a truly brilliant idea and post it here. Affinity decides to run with it and agree to pay me a penny a copy once they implement it. All good. Oh no. People from Adobe and Quark are reading this forum. They have stolen my idea. They are using it and not paying me.

But you presume you would post the idea publicly in a forum post.

Please consider the possibilty that Affinity decides to define a username for suggestions and that you would send the idea by Affinity forum mail to that username, thus the idea would not be made public and would only be known about publicly when launched in a product.

52 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Your best bet is to take your idea and write it out and set up meetings with several software companies.

i would be happy to send an idea to Affinity if there comes into existence an infrastructure such that if Affinity takes it up that I receive a small percentage of the extra money that Affinity makes as a result of taking up the idea.

William

 

[William Overington]

@henryanthony

I did once write to a large well-known food manufacturing company suggesting a new product and I received a polite reply explaining that they employed people to devise new products and had a policy that no ideas for new products sent in by members of the public would be passed to those people in case they had already thought of that idea themselves.

I supposed to myself that that was so that if they produced a new food product that they had a credible legal defence if anyone were to claim that he or she had sent in the idea and now wanted payment claiming it had been taken up without paying them a royalty.

William

 

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

i would be happy to send an idea to Affinity if there comes into existence an infrastructure such that if Affinity takes it up that I receive a small percentage of the extra money that Affinity makes as a result of taking up the idea.

First, they would never agree to that unless you could somehow prove the idea is an original one of yours that no one else has ever thought of. You & Canva would also both need to be prepared to defend any legal actions resulting from claims by others that the idea was something they thought of first.

Second, how could Canva quantify how much money implementing that idea had made them?

But more to the point, consider it akin to trying to copyright or patent an idea vs. copyrighting or patenting something substantive like a book or an invention. AFAIK, there is no legal precedent for anything like that.

[William Overington]

21 minutes ago, pixelstuff said:

What you described is an example where the designer did all the work to make the idea from the sportswear business (a logo that communicates such and such) become a reality. Likewise Affinity is doing all the work to implement a user idea from the forums like the logo designer did. The sportwear business paid the logo designer and forum users are paying Affinity.

For your parallel to match up with Affinity paying for ideas, the logo designer should be paying the sportswear business for their idea. That would be silly.

No, the sportswear company stated its needs, for example "we want a logo that expresses graceful performances in athletic events while wearing our sportswear so people feel that what they do while wearing our sportswear is graceful" and the designer produces a design that expresses that.

William

 

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, William Overington said:

No, the sportswear company stated its needs, for example "we want a logo that expresses graceful performances in athletic events while wearing our sportswear so people feel that what they do while wearing our sportswear is graceful" and the designer produces a design that expresses that.

IOW, the designer did all the work to produce the design, just like @pixelstuff said. So unless you did all the work to turn your idea into an actual product feature, why would you expect Canva to pay you anything for it?

[William Overington]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

IOW, the designer did all the work to produce the design, just like @pixelstuff said. So unless you did all the work to turn your idea into an actual product feature, why would you expect Canva to pay you anything for it?

Because Canva would not have the benefit resulting from what I had suggested to them if I had not suggested it to them.

William

 

[Bryan Rieger]

26 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I did once write to a large well-known food manufacturing company suggesting a new product and I received a polite reply explaining that they employed people to devise new products and had a policy that no ideas for new products sent in by members of the public would be passed to those people in case they had already thought of that idea themselves.

This is standard practice in product design and development. It’s often referred to as a “clean-room protocol” and is put in place to safeguard against potential IP infringements.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, William Overington said:

Because Canva would not have the benefit resulting from what I had suggested to them if I had not suggested it to them.

There is absolutely no way you could know if what you suggested to them was an original idea that had not been suggested by someone else inside or outside the company, & no way for either you or them to know what if any monetary benefits would be derived solely from its implementation.

But regardless, you are not doing any of the work needed to implement the idea, which is why your sportswear analogy is bogus.