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.