On Spec

There's a heated argument raging, and we've heard it before, about the reality of both spec work and crowdsourcing creeping their way into the design community.

At the CreativePro site, founding editor Pamela Pfiffner writes that "Spec Work and Crowdsourcing" are "Gambles that Don't Pay Off".

(The whole thing does remind me of that John Cusak and Tim Robbins movie, Tapeheads, where the guys always doing everything on spec and never getting paid for it.)

True enough, you won't find a lot of members of the AIGA huddling around a table at their local watering hole going on and on about the New and Wonderful Age of crowdsourcing. I'm guessing the majority of them would agree with Steve Douglas, from The Logo Factory, who was interviewed for the article: "According to [crowdsourcing site CrowdSpring's] home page, designers have submitted over 219,000 entries" as of this April 2009. "If we average each entry out to an hour's worth of a designer's time, and that's a hugely underrated figure, that equates to 25 years of unpaid designer labor."

In full disclosure, I do admit that Matt in our Marketing department ran a contest on a crowdsourcing site, mostly as a lark, not realizing how much Designers hated them. We all realized it was a boneheaded idea and ended up giving all contestants the prize money and apologizing profusely. Though we never intended to use the work, as suspected, the work we saw was not what we'd expect from Designers who met with the client to actually form a relationship, not just pop out a logo.

But you should do yourself a favor, if you're in the design world, and give the article a read and weigh in here or on the CreativePro site.

Or just read the comments on their page.

Believe me, there are plenty.

(Photo by cote)