Spec work is killing the design industry.
Spec — short for ‘speculative’ — work is applying the ‘try before you buy’ principles of selling cars to the design industry (hopefully you can see already what a bad idea this is). In short, it is any work in which a fair fee has not been agreed upon up front. This should seem obvious enough to most professional designers out there; personally, I don’t take on any projects these days unless there is a signed contract and — if a flat fee rather than on hourly fee is chosen — between 30% to 50% of the fee up front.
Anybody that has been ripped off by a client that decided not to pay at the end of a project, or decided that the fee is too large and they will pay the amount they feel is ‘fair’, knows how stupid it is to take on spec work. But there is another form of spec work: the design ‘competition’. Design competitions have been around for decades, but the popularity of the web has brought us many websites hosting these competitions — and some of them even promise a reasonable fee.
We’ll ignore for now the hundreds of websites and forums that are populated with “best design for a logo that contains a picture of my cat and the words ‘synergy’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘cross-platform’ will be PayPal’d £20″. While these design pleas are universally terrible, I have been told that the main entrants for these are 16 year-old’s that have just pirated a copy of Adobe Photoshop and are looking for weed money, not exactly my audience here.
The new breed of design competitions is represented by many quite recently launched websites (which I have deigned not to provide links for) that appear to offer a reasonable fee. They act as intermediaries between the client and hundreds of designers. The client puts up the brief and the amount they are willing to pay, and the designers clamber over each-other in an effort to win the £300 or however much is being offered. While — if you only spend a few hours on your design before you submit it — this may look like quite the deal, this is definitely not true. Depending on the quality of your work, your chance of actually getting paid is only 1:number_of_designers_entered, while the client is getting hours_worked x number_of_designers_entered worth of design. How does that not look like a terrible deal for anybody that entered, and a brilliant deal for the client?
It’s easy enough to stop all this, just say no to spec work. When the clients realise that the logo designed by the 16 year-old with a pirated copy of Photoshop isn’t holding up, they’ll have to come to you.
Indeed, I didn’t mean to imply that ‘crowdsourcing’ was the death knell of the design industry. It will never become much bigger than it currently is, but I don’t doubt it will be quite a while before its popularity wanes in certain sectors.
Rather, I think of this as a warning to people new in the industry or looking to establish themselves: that it’s not worth the effort to make what looks like a quick buck (but often will not be).
Thanks for the comment Andrew.
Ryan on .
I don’t see these competitions as the death knell of the industry by a long shot. It’s true that certain people in the corporate ad world, maybe jostling for position as the ship goes down, have latched on to “crowdsourcing” as the future of design. But ask them how these contest sites can feasibly produce a well-thought out web application, motion graphics piece, or mobile app and you’ll get a blank stare in response.
Andrew L on .