A good designer would treat it as an actual design project rather than merely a "make it pretty" project. A good designer would step back and examine the actual business and functional problems and evaluate ways in which design could solve them. They'd work with the client to translate those problems and solutions into a visual and functional design.

Rather, in this project, it sounds like this Andrew.Tweed (the OP) attempted to solve all those problems himself, and then went shopping (shadily, I would say) for a photoshop monkey to solve his only issue, the "make pretty" part.

One of the other things you get working with a real designer is an actual relationship. When you need some collateral designed or work on a new project done, a designer that knows you and your business is invaluable. I wouldn't say it's impossible to find with some guy over the internet you paid $3000 to make your website, but I'd say it's less likely.

This may have been effective from a narrow viewpoint, but a real design process it was not.

The part that's so frustrating is that thomvest (and lots of other companies) is in the business of creating relationships and yet they don't understand how having a relationship with a designer/agency will benefit them.

I completely agree.

If a company treats the people involved in its business relationships as cheap, expendable commodities - the company is not going to shine.

And it's an investor/partner/employer to avoid

A good designer wouldn't participate.

Would you feel the same way if you thought you were hiring a designer and they sold you what amounts to a template that they've used for a hundred other clients? After all, the designer would merely be a good steward of his time by maximizing the value of work already done.

Selling the same work to multiple business owners is the flipside of spec'ing out to multiple designers. Think of it as a contest to see who the best businessperson is, by seeing who can derive the most business value from the same design.

Great point. It's interesting to think of crowdsourcing websites as just another channel through which designers can sell templates.

If the customization/client service end is kept to a minimum, a 10% conversion would probably be a pretty nice, relatively hassle-free business. There'd be an initial investment of time in developing a stock of templates to use, but after that, a designer could probably profit off the same work for quite some time, with a minimum of effort dropping in logos, changing colors and swapping stock photos.

And for every 'contest' won, a 99designer would make way more than they could selling a single psd template—not to mention having a much more aggressive sales strategy and zero advertising costs.

It kind of makes you wonder who's exploiting who.