Guy Kawasaki offers Designers an opportunity, they get pissed | Hacker News Reader

Guy Kawasaki offers Designers an opportunity, they get pissed

clanrossconcepts.blogspot.com

Designers always get pissed about competitions. They call it "spec work", for "speculative". They have a lot of specific complaints:

* It requires them to trust the content-holder to honor the contest and not just take the best idea and farm it out to someone cheaper.

* It allows unscrupulous clients to harvest good ideas, for free, from lots of designers and feed them to the contest winner.

* It forces designers to do work they won't get paid for if they don't get selected.

* It prevents designers from getting to know the client and figuring out how best to deliver the project.

* It opens the project up to non-professional designers who are just as likely to have stolen design components as to have built them for the project.

Some of these arguments make sense (I wouldn't hold a contest after seeing how a bunch of them went). But a lot it has more to do with a privileged position designers want to create for their field. In virtually every other field, some form of what a designer would call "spec work" is the norm. Lawyers do consults. Consultants offer advice in the run-up to a large project. Building a proposal might take 1-2 full-time weeks of work, and your hit rate on those might not be better than 50%.

The spec work of this sort is not a proposal; it is the actual work. Your analogies in other fields break down, because for the designers, this work is like the lawyer's case (not a consultation) and like the consultants "large project".

Amazing how simple this should be. If you don't find the $1000 prize worth it, don't participate. Likewise, don't tell someone who does see the $1000 prize worth it that he or she shouldn't participate. Market forces. Instead of seeing this as a sign of the times, they just complain. They don't seem to be able to understand that the world is a continually changing landscape. Nothing stays the same forever.

The $1000 prize is not worth it. It's not worth it for an established designer nor a fledgling designer. The time spent on the chance of being selected is far better spent doing one of two things: working on your portfolio presentation or approaching prospective clients. The fact is, designers are regularly under appreciated and their work is misunderstood. These types of projects only amplify that under appreciation and misunderstanding, while placing their work in the hands of a potentially unscrupulous individual with no contract in place.

A comment in the linked article states it plainly: if Kawasaki wished to encourage new, undiscovered designers he could easily have used his large network to identify and review portfolios. That would be either the honest method or the non-naive method of finding the designer that met his criteria. So really the question is, should I assume Kawasaki was naive?

By any chance, do you know of the podcast The Totally Rad Show? One of the main aspects of the show is asking fans to submit fan artwork utilizing the TRS logo, with the "prize" being that they will use it in their opening segment's backdrop. Essentially, their "prize" is zero dollars plus fame and recognition.

Tell me the essential difference between what they do and what Guy Kawasaki has offered. No one is up in arms over what the guys at TRS are doing. They're in fact offering less than what Guy Kawasaki is offering. Much much less.

I'm not hurting financially by any means, though I have been wanting to create something for TRS just for fun and the possibility that they'll use it in their show. Likewise, I might actually submit something for Guy's book as well.

So I pose a simple question to you? Who are you to tell me that I shouldn't?

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