Why Spec Work Devalues Our Industry

March 2, 2012

We’re pretty passionate about what we do and the industry that we work in. It’s important to us to speak our minds in our little corner of the web about things that help our industry as well as things that hurt it.

The topic of speculative (spec) work came up in the studio today and we wanted to share our thoughts on it and why it devalues our industry. The short end of it is that we think that asking people to blindly submit work that they may not be  compensated for is wrong. As an agency, we don’t do free work to win a job and we wouldn’t ask anyone to do that for us. Asking someone (or tons of people) to use their time, skills and talents to take a stab at creating a logo or web site at the slim chance that they might win is just plain insulting. You wouldn’t ask a dozen CPAs to do your taxes, then pick the best one and pay them with some fruit, would you?

Rather than rewriting everything that has been said, here are some supporting articles that perfectly echoes our beliefs on why spec work and spec contests are bad for our industry:

No-Spec and what Spec work really is

AIGA’s official position on spec work

Creative Freelancesr article by Heather Parlato

Here are six thing you can do about spec work

We’d love to hear your comments on this, chime in on Twitter, or on our Facebook page.