Erik Akers

This was orig­i­nally posted in Dec. 2008, but as I’ve been refor­mat­ting post for the site I thought it would be a good time to bring this to the front page again and repub­lish it.

Design­ers con­sider spec work the dirty hairy under­belly of design work. Some design­ers don’t know how to han­dle being asked for spec work, other design­ers are flat out against it and will walk away from any pos­si­ble client if they ask for it. If you don’t know what spec work is this is the eas­i­est way that I’ve found to describe it, and remem­ber before you read this there is no other indus­try in the world were this would be asked of some­one seriously.

Imag­ine you own a auto ser­vice and repair shop. One day a cus­tomer walked in the door hav­ing car prob­lems, no idea of what it is or could be all you know is it has major prob­lems that some­one is going to have to find and fix them. So you tell the cus­tomer that you’ll get to work on it and call him with a quote to fix it. The cus­tomer responses to that by say­ing, “Why don’t you go a head and fix it, call me and I’ll come pick it up and if I like how you fixed it then I’ll pay for it. If I don’t like how it’s fixed I’ll take my busi­ness some­where else.”

But the car is already fixed, so are you going to unfix it if the cus­tomer does like your work? Or are you going to tell this cus­tomer they should take their car some­where else before you even look at it? Most peo­ple wouldn’t think twice in telling this cus­tomer to go some­where else.

This is spec work, a designer take time and effort to cre­ate some­thing with the hope of get­ting paid for it, but hav­ing a very real chance of walk­ing away from the client with none but wasted time.

AIGA, Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Graphic Arts, the pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion for design takes this posi­tion on spec work:

AIGA believes that doing spec­u­la­tive work seri­ously com­pro­mises the qual­ity of work that clients are enti­tled to and also vio­lates a tacit, long-standing eth­i­cal stan­dard in the com­mu­ni­ca­tion design pro­fes­sion world­wide. AIGA strongly dis­cour­ages the prac­tice of request­ing that design work be pro­duced and sub­mit­ted on a spec­u­la­tive basis in order to be con­sid­ered for accep­tance on a project.

So with that, why is it that so many cus­tomers ask this of design­ers with­out think­ing twice about it? A lot of design­ers, young [design­ers] and free­lancers, think this is a way to get in the door or how to win clients over. Not think­ing that if they do it once some­one is going to ask again, maybe some­one that the first client referred and they would be expect­ing it as well. So it ends up being a cir­cle design­ers then can not get out of with the pos­si­bil­ity of los­ing business.

Now days if any­thing close to spec work comes up when I’m talk­ing to a client, I clearly state that there will be an agree­ment for the cost and some pay­ment before any work will begin.

Basi­cally it shouldn’t hap­pen, again like I said above in no other indus­try would even be asked. So why is it asked of design­ers, some­times like it’s the right of a client?

First and fore­most, it is unfair to the designer. Because it not out of the ques­tion for some­one to take the work they did to some­one else, or some­one that knows “graphic design” in their office and have them recre­ate the work. With­out get­ting into a huge legal talk about it, steal­ing work that was not paid for or using work with­out a release of the copy­right from the artist, in this case the designer, is copy­right infringe­ment and against the law.

I think there are a cou­ple of big rea­sons why peo­ple ask for spec work:

• Every­thing thinks they know a “designer” and they can just talk to them if they need any­thing. This designer could be any­one from a kid to employee that claims to know Pho­to­shop or some from of image edit­ing soft­ware. This leads to them devalu­ing what a designer really does because a lot of peo­ple think that any­one can design anything.
• Most peo­ple just can not visu­al­ize ideas and want to be able to see it. Design­ers nor­mally have a great abil­ity to visu­al­ize what they want to cre­ate and what they are talk­ing with clients about. So this leads to the think­ing that they need to see some­thing before they pay for it, there for they want a sam­ple of what a designer will do for them and not just to look at the other projects a designer has completed.
• Design­ers do not do a good job of explain­ing the design process. This leads to clients being in the dark about how things are done. Since most know some­one that can put things together with Pho­to­shop they have the mis­con­cep­tion that it’s every­one can do. So clients don’t under­stand the amount of time it takes to com­plete a project.

Most clients just don’t know it’s wrong. It’s really up to design­ers to han­dle how to talk about it will clients not the other way around. But I feel that clients should know what they are really ask­ing for when they ask for spec work and should think about how they would react if some­one asked for the same thing from them.

As I was in the process of fin­ish­ing up this post and sched­ul­ing it to be pub­lished, this good arti­cle from David Airey’s blog about Spec Work showed up in my Google Reader. (Most of the time I just share the best things I get in my Reader with the list on the right, but this being the same sub­ject I’m talk­ing about here, I though it would be bet­ter served to link it here.)

Check it out: http://www.davidairey.com/a-conversation-about-spec-work/