I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Design Done Today...(maybe)

I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Design Done Today…(maybe)

14 Comments

Design is a large field with so many talented people all working hard to get their work out there and in the public’s eye. So many wonderful examples of web ingenuity streaming through the online cyber circuit daily, and many of them attached to burgeoning designers hoping to land some freelance work. Making money through their designs is the dream, and they are not hoping to wake anytime soon. This provides the companies who’d like to use these designers or their work, a wide selection of skillful, creative people to choose from. Unfortunately, some of the companies looking for designers are sticking to an age old business tactic to aid them in their search. Scamming the naive artist. It may be an oldie, but it’s still proving plenty effective.

“NO!SPEC 5” by Jeff Andrews of Jeff Andrews Design

Now, I know we live in a capitalistic society, and profits often outweigh pesky little things like ethics, and I further recognize that dreamers are easy marks holding bold-faced targets over their hearts, but come on. This practice is ridiculously insulting, totally lacking of respect, and overtly subversive. I’m talking, of course, about speculative work. For those of you who are not familiar with this practice (I’m so happy for you), and I’ll fill you in on the details.

Speculative work is that which someone approaches and asks you to perform under promise of possible future payment. Generally determined by your performance, their interpretation and satisfaction with your performance, and their ability to keep their word. Now some of you are probably thinking that is pure and utter madness. Saying to yourselves, “Work for free, and hope to get paid later? Forget that insanity!” or something along those lines. I doubt seriously any of you are thinking, “Wow, sign me up for some of that! Yeah, buddy!” To offer another perspective, let me put it like this.

If someone were to come up to you and ask you to build them a house (and you were in the field), but they said that they wouldn’t pay you for blueprinting or anything up front. Instead, what they were going to do, is have a few other builders working in the same area building them a house as well (they don’t have anything too specific in mind either, they want to see what you can come up with). Now once all of the houses are built, they will come into the neighborhood survey all the fine craftsmanship built in their name, and pick exactly one of those houses. That builder will get paid for all of their hard work and their time spent working up the plans. The rest of the builders, well, they will get a big pat on the back for their valiant efforts and then their houses will all be destroyed. No financial compensation for them whatsoever. No matter how much they put into their design, it was all for naught. Sounds ludicrous, right? Yeah, well that doesn’t keep it from happening throughout the design community.

“Spec: Don’t Make Me Get The Soap!” by Jerett Patterson of Five6teen

An entire subculture within the design community has been fashioned around the idea that a designer’s time and efforts, are less valuable than in most any other industry. Several sites are dedicated to facilitating this kind of minimalism of the creative role. Businesses flock to these spec sites promising to pay lots of money to designers for their work, in an open-bidding creative ‘deathmatch’, if you will. They give a few guidelines for the framework and then let the imaginative ones take over. Collectively, with the number of clamoring designers working on this single project, hours upon hours are literally spent building, submitting, taking critiques and feedback and restructuring, tearing down, breaking down, and re-building. Hours that the company would have had to pay for, if they had contracted with a design firm or individual in the beginning. The business has just saved thousands.

You see, most established designers will tell you that to truly design something effective for a company, you need to spend a decent amount of time (billable time, that is) researching the firm and getting to know them. This way the design truly matches with the business’ style, presence, and mission. Without this intimate knowledge of the company you are trying to design for, the work may not fit as well as it could. This could ultimately end up causing the organization that started the ‘contest’ to not feel particularly comfortable with any of the designs. So they withdraw the offer, keep their money, and take all of the fresh new ideas that they didn’t have before to a design firm or single designer to work them up something that fits (and since you’ve done so much of the work already, the people they do hire, will only have to labor half as hard to incorporate what the company liked from your designs into something the business will accept. Seems like a pretty flawed system, huh?

“No Spec” by Rob Gough of Gough Graphics

And so many designers get sucked in. Especially in the beginning, when they are new to the field, trying desperately to get established and have some of their work take hold, or at least add to their portfolio (that’s usually a close friend or family request. “Hey, if you make this for me, you could put it up in your portfolio. I’m just trying to help you out.” Awww, the ties that bind…and occasionally chafe.). But it’s important that we as a community work together to put a stop to this kind of creative exploitation, and spreading the word is a big part of that. When we first began down this road, we had never heard of the NO!SPEC movement, and I’m sure that there are others out there who still haven’t.

NO!SPEC is a group that has risen up to fight this wave of unethical abuse of the design community, and their numbers are growing everyday. They want designers to get paid fairly for their time and work, and to be respected as the professionals that they are. I’m sorry, but I see it as totally disrespectful to just expect people to spend hours of their time crafting designs specifically to your needs (so they can’t, in most cases, use it anywhere else) and not compensate them fairly for their work. It says plainly that you do not believe they deserve to treated like every other professional person out there. And it’s about time this demeaning treatment was ended.

“Specters Beware” by Jeremy Yamaguchi of Zero Designs

To find out more about the this movement, visit NO!SPEC today! So what do you think? Is this speculative system fair and balanced, or fundamentally flawed?

14 Comments »

Adam Morse said:

It never ceases to amaze me the disconnect people have with even when a designer gets paid. “Can you make this site live now and we’ll worry about payment later?”. The problem is…no one wants to spend money on something that they already have. It’s important as a design community for us to stop supporting this behavior at all. It can be tough to make those calls, but no one expects to be able to walk into a grocery store and grab an apple only to pay ‘later’ because there aren’t any grocery stores that operate that way… we need to change this ourselves.

# 8 August 2008 at 10:57 am

Robert Bowen (author) said:

Thanks for that, Adam. It is so true, once they have what they want, they don’t want to pay for it then. It is also up to the community as a whole to try and stop this, but it will take the entire community to do it! Thanks again.

# 8 August 2008 at 11:25 am

redbyte said:

I love reading stuff like this.

As a newbie to the design community I was quite taken aback by the all the photoshop artists that enter “competitions” (using that word very loosely) in hopes of their design being chosen. Then when it doesn’t just taking it on the chin and saying “oh well… that’s how this industry works”.

It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one that thinks this is wrong and that there are designers out there that put their foot down to this kind of treatment.

I will now do the same.

# 8 August 2008 at 10:55 pm

Robert Bowen (author) said:

@ redbyte Glad that it connected and resonated with you. Hopefully the message will eventually be understood throughout the community.

Many thanks!

# 8 August 2008 at 11:49 pm

Erika said:

Okay. First of all, I LOVE the title of this post.

Secondly, I think that EVERY blogger in the web technology field should write at least ONE post about speculative work and how fundamentally inappropriate it is. For no other reason, but just to ensure that ONE other human being is reached and made to realize the reality of the situation.

Lastly, the comment above me that mentioned clients wanting the site to be live before they pay [the final amount]…. okay, it took my getting burned one good time for me to realize that I’ll never let that happen again. Designers really need to sit down and discuss the legal possibilities with a lawyer or a strategist of some sort to help protect themselves and their time from unscrupulous people out there, because there are folks out there who will spend day and night trying to figure out ways to save an extra few hundred… especially with the way the US economy is behaving lately.

Beautiful website! I’ll be coming back.

# 9 August 2008 at 11:39 am

Robert Bowen (author) said:

Erika

First of all, THANKS so much! I was really happy with the title and you’re the first person to say anything about it. So YEAH!

I agree about the spec posts. There need to be so many more of these articles out there. And it would be nice to see less of these ‘contests’ and ‘portfolio builders’ being offered.

That sucks that you got burned like that. And again, I agree, there needs to be more protection for designers, especially, as you pointed out with the current economic conditions in the US.

Thanks again, for the thoughtful comments and praise for the site as well. We look forward to having you return!

# 9 August 2008 at 4:20 pm

Simon North said:

Hi, I am aware of this happening to other designers, luckily I never go near a project without a 20% deposit and no files are ever transferred till I receive the other 80%. I always make clients pay for the work I do and we agree that before I start, even if they dont use the design. I know its a big problem for many people in the design community and if people say no then it will soon stop so thanks for pointing it out to a lot of people.

And btw, I’m gonna feature this post in todays HD Todaily over at Help Developer.

Once again thanks

Simon Norths last blog post..HD Todaily - 25/08/08

# 26 August 2008 at 11:08 am

Robert Bowen (author) said:

Thanks Simon. That’s really kind of you to feature the article, not to mention saying all those nice things about it! That’s a good policy you have there, and double bonus points for not having to learn it the hard way, as so many designers do.

I agree that more need to be aware of this issue to help bring it to an end. So we are really grateful that you have helped spread the word.

# 27 August 2008 at 3:42 pm

Mike Smith said:

Awesome post and some nice graphics. Thanks for posting.

It’s the 12-13 year olds just picking up photoshop and passing themselves off as designers that are killing the value in the market. People are used to kids designing for cheap/free and getting work done by people from India and other countries at $5.00 an hour USD. It’s amazing how many emails I’ve got that ended with “I figured this would be an easy task” or “My friends told me it should be a quick job”. All resulting in the same thing “can I get something for nothing”… Answer: NO!

Mike Smiths last blog post..Simple Affiliate URLs in Wordpress

# 12 September 2008 at 9:12 pm

Brochure Printing | PrintPlace said:

I’m not a designer, but a writer and I see writing jobs all the time that ask for a free, original sample. It boggles my mind that anyone would do this. I have samples that I’ve already written on my portfolio Web site, but these people think they can get free work out of me. Unfortunately, a lot of college students and others new to writing will do this, which takes business away from me and other experienced writers. Non-creative professions don’t do samples for no money, so I don’t see why creative pros are expected to! Thanks for the post – it obviously hit a sore spot!

# 26 November 2008 at 12:33 am

Martijn Vreugde said:

Incredibly relevant article. I despise companies who try get me to design on spec, to you know “show us what you can do for us and if we like it we’ll take it”

# 26 November 2008 at 3:34 am