Our colleagues from AIGA issued an open letter to the Tokyo Olympic Committee themed Against Crowdsourcing Logo Design. The letter aims to defend the interests of designers.

Being also concerned about the interests of the other graphic designers, we strongly disagree with AIGA's position on this issue. In our opinion AIGA's approach has nothing to do with professional ethics but rather reveals the stagnation of the design community, fear of growing competitors number and an artificial attempt to narrow the circle of rivals.

We've been following the situation with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo from the very beginning. The scandal with logo plagiarism of the original version of the logo for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics showed that the involvement of trained and experienced designers did not ensure the quality of work.

Japan has been traditionally renowned for its futureorientness and innovativeness in all spheres, including design. In our view, the announced crowd-sourced competition to design the emblems for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is an excellent example of "form follows function" principle implementation. Such truly global and diverse event like the Olympics should be as diverse, democratic and open to all proposals as possible. Moreover, we believe that crowdsourcing is the future of communication design and this by no means will not reduce the role of graphic designer.

We believe that graphic design is for everyone in every sense. Everyone has a right to design.

We believe that all people are created equal with equal rights and opportunities and any kind of design elitism and snobbism are inappropriate.

We disclaim any artificial limitation leading to professional exclusion.