Is Tim Ferriss acting like an asshole?
ideasonideas.com
ideasonideas.com
Listen, I hate having my work undervalued too. I get it. But guess what? The value of my work isn't what I think it is, it is what other people think it is.
That's the heart of the matter: Designers tend to have inflated ideas of their value; more importantly, non designers tend to have low opinions of design work.
You can't sell BMW's to people who think a Chevy is more than enough. Crying that a person that comes into your dealership and says: "My budget is $20K" is some sort of religious persecution isn't winning you any friends. Even worse, suggesting that Chevy should start selling their cars at $50K so that they can see how much better your bimmers are smacks of self-righteous ego.
The whole point of spec or contests or paying for a cheaper solution is that the customer has already decided that the value of your work is not worth the cost. Get over yourself already and go sell to people who do appreciate whatever it is you offer.
Set your price at what you consider fair, then find the right customer. If you can survive, great, but don't tell others in different situations what to do please.
The thing about these kinds of contests is that they serve a niche that very much wanted filling: Low budget design projects that "real" design firms wouldn't touch.
Large clients already get ideas on spec from those design firms...this "contest" process just makes it possible for small companies to get the same treatment. Yes, it comes from less experienced designers, and it comes with some additional problems (like the unpredictability of follow-on work, which may or may not be of reasonable quality and may or may not be available from the same designer at all). But, for one-off design work, like a logo, it's simply the best way for a small business to get design work done quickly and cost-effectively.
When times get tough, as in a recession, folks often start looking for people to blame for their own reduced income. Some folks blame immigrants, and this is just an indirect version of that...blaming foreigners for working too cheap and cheapening their trade by accepting these contest terms. Because the reality is that most of the designers taking part in $250 contests are overseas.
The funny thing is that software shops have historically gotten some flack for using design contests and such...but the fact is software development was among the first to experience this pressure from cheap overseas white collar human resources. We hackers have been dealing with it far longer than designers, and though a few among us belly-ache and bitch and moan, most of us have embraced the differences and compete on quality and taste rather than price.
In other words: Tim Ferriss, while possibly an asshole on other occasions and for other reasons, is not acting like an asshole by holding a design contest.
The second, and most obvious criticism of anti-spec arguments, is that the designers on the other end are choosing to engage in them. If the anti-spec crowd can't convince designers who participate in spec contests, why should we pay them any attention?
For people who feel so passionately about a topic, I wish they would at least put the time into creating a more compelling argument.
No, this is not the same. Large clients get little bits of spec work done for them which, on the whole, are not very useful in an of itself. To actually get the work done they will still need to pick a winning bidder and pay them fairly for the work.
In other words, the invested effort vs. the potential reward is pretty favorable for the design firm. For one thing, you're not competing against 50,000 other people on the interwebs, and secondly there's no danger of the client "stealing" your work - since they themselves would have little use for what amounts to an insignificant portion of the grand project.
That's a pretty key difference - in this case Ferriss has not promised a contract to the winning bidder, and what he is asking for is complete work directly. This strikes me as unfair. Where the traditional spec-work model is supposed to be a "try before you buy" thing, Ferriss is simply asking for a bunch of free, final copies to be produced for him gratis.
The point of the argument stands. If someone asked you to do a week's worth of work for free as a trial for, say, a 5-year contract, that strikes me as a pretty worthwhile deal.
Now if someone asked you to do a week's worth of work for free as a trial for, say, another week's contract, that strikes me as abusive and lacking in respect for my work. Worse if it's just working gratis for the possibility of another contract.
Tuesday.
This is what sets me off about the NO!SPEC drama: this idea that lawyers and engineers would never give their time away for free. Of course, they routinely do. I've gotten multiple hours of free consult from two different top law firms, without even any expectation of any immediate work.
It is absolutely essential, for legal reasons, to get a signed waiver of copyright from any person that you accept spec work from. Otherwise, when Ferriss' book cover comes out, and it is red and blue with a muscular-looking guy on it, every single person who submitted a red-and-blue-muscle-guy cover will sue him for copyright infringement. There could be hundreds of them.
This is why screenwriters are told to never, ever send unsolicited manuscripts to movie studios. The studios will send them back unopened, encased in slightly larger envelopes, because even opening the envelope will create legal risk: If your script for Transformers 3 has been opened, your lawyer will be able to claim that the studio has seen it, and that the giant metal Cuisinart that appears in the final movie was obviously inspired by the giant metal Kitchenaid that appears in your script, and that they owe you $1 million.
No, not for free - for trade. He's offering all the publicity that he can generate as a return gesture. If you think that is a worthy trade, great. If not, great too.
Stop forcing people to negotiate their deals on your terms. It's called a free market for a reason.
No he's not. The author of the article addresses this specifically - he's saying that too many people looking for spec work promise this ephemeral, vague notion of "exposure", which really isn't worth as much as the client thinks it is.
And he brings up the Harry Potter example. EVERYONE has seen the cover to the Harry Potter books, but does anyone here actually know the designer's name?
> Stop forcing people to negotiate their deals on your terms. It's called a free market for a reason.
I wish the real world can be as black-and-white as yours. There are certain types of behaviour that is, in the long run anyway, a net negative for nearly everyone in an industry. There is nothing wrong with being in opposition to these things. It's not like we're hiring thugs to beat up people who are willing to do spec work.
Yes, he is.
which really isn't worth as much as the client thinks it is.
That's a completely different argument, and I addressed this in my first post.
a net negative for nearly everyone in an industry.
Um, except for the kid who turns around in a week's time and can say: You know that new Tim Ferris book? I designed that.
Clearly, not everyone.
I'm always concerned when people start talking about benefiting industry. In almost every case, the "benefit to the industry" is at a loss to the consumer.
It's not like we're hiring thugs to beat up people who are willing to do spec work.
No, but you have no problem publicly vilifying them, do you?
Please to not be putting words in my mouth? Kthx.
Seriously though, I don't have a problem with people willing to do spec work at all - I see it as a symptom of a systematic problem that is encouraged by people abusing the spec work model.
As I've said before, the concept of spec work originally is so that the client can "try before they buy" - given that designers have such a high variance, and the product is hardly a commodity. You do a bit of leg work, show off your chops, and the rest of a sizable job is yours.
The problem here is when people start soliciting complete work for commercial purposes. This is not a try-before-you-buy, this is just give-me-stuff-for-free.
Material benefits (and lack thereof) aside, I think this model reeks of disrespect for the design community (disclosure: I am a coder, not a designer). I've issued these design contests myself in the past, and I no longer do so - and every single time I did, I felt like a jackass, since clearly I was trying to get something for nothing. I was trying to gain ownership for a volume of work that is worth far more than what I paid for it (in cash, "exposure", etc). This is not an equitable trade, and I knew it the entire time - and I think a reasonably smart guy like Ferriss knows this too.
By the way, since I saw a post somewhere in this thread... I issued the contests because I was too poor to pay for real design work - but that's a justification to myself and myself only, and does nothing to change the fact that I the trade was still not equitable.
You're always competing with lots of other people; and there will be more to compete with tomorrow than there are today. That is the reality of the ever-shrinking world in which we live. The good news is that those same people entering the market are also consumers of goods and services, and thus grow the total value of the market, making humanity as a whole richer.
Anyway, if you don't want to compete, you shouldn't be in a competitive customer-facing industry. You should work for someone else, far away from the sales and marketing process. Design is pretty much always tightly coupled with marketing; them's the breaks.
there's no danger of the client "stealing" your work
This is a wholly orthogonal issue.
There's always danger of clients not paying, checks bouncing, promises not being kept, people stealing art from the web. It goes both ways: I've had designers flake on me and not keep promises and deadlines. This is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Theft of design work happens, but it's not exclusive to the design contest model (and I've never even heard that it's a major problem with the model, but I don't follow it very closely; but, I think the very act of putting up the contest indicates the client would rather buy art than grab something off of the Internet and re-purpose it for free). And, we are specifically talking about someone for whom stealing $250 worth of work would do dramatically more damage to his reputation than a measly 250 bucks. I don't think Tim Ferriss would steal $250 worth of design work.
Where the traditional spec-work model is supposed to be a "try before you buy" thing, Ferriss is simply asking for a bunch of free, final copies to be produced for him gratis.
What a tyrant. Good thing you can decline the offer.
This is roughly the same situation, but with code rather than art (ignoring the differences with open sourcing and whatnot). I doubt that GitHub expects the guys writing recommendation engines at Facebook/Google/wherever are going to participate in this contest for some bourbon and a GitHub account, and I doubt Tim expects big name graphic designers to make the cover of his book for $250. I certainly haven't seen any Facebook employees blogging about how the GitHub contest is demeaning to their industry though.
Serious question: I absolutely do not mean to in any way demean or trivialize the work of designers, but how is doing design work for spec any different than other creative pursuits, like writing a novel, painting, or authoring a screenplay? First-time creatives usually do those things with little to no hope of getting paid, and no one seems to be up in arms. Can someone enlighten me as to the difference?
Spec is initiated by another party. Meanwhile, it takes advantage of people who have little other choice, and often leaves them with little to show for having done so.
The "taking advantage of people" thing is a canard. Designers are in business like everybody else. There's no reason they need to be protected from the market any more than a carpenter or an architect.
[%] I don't know if Ferriss demanded a contract before accepting a submission or not, but I do know that the anti-spec brigade would have a problem with the contest either way.
And while spec is initiated by another party, doesn't that imply that there's at least some demand?
Let's take another approach: what's a better solution? If you have an aspiring designer with no portfolio or references, how should they get started? I hire designers, and I'd be reluctant to hire someone with no track record...what if I hate what they produce?
It's all about restricting demand to improve the outcomes of industry insiders at the expense of industry outsiders.
Yes, the difference here is that if you write a novel, create a painting, make a sculpture etc, and your target client doesn't buy, you can shop around for another buyer.
I'm not really sure there's a market out there for "book cover for a Tim Ferriss book" other than Tim Ferriss himself. This is the problem with spec work of this variety - you have one winner, and a bajillion losers who will now see absolutely nothing for all the work done.
> how should they get started?
At a shop, working under someone more reputed than they are, until they have a large enough portfolio of their own to show potential clients. That's the ideal scenario anyways...
You can apply the same thing to programmers, though. Say you have an aspiring hacker with no references or previous code to show you - how should they get started?
This type of contest really is just the same for designers: If you don't need practice, don't participate. If you do, it's a great way to hone your talent, and possibly win something (although that's really just a bonus).
When you're getting started in any profession, there's a certain amount of pro bono work performed to gain experience and build your resume/portfolio -- how is this any different?
A lot of people go to art or design school. Which is to say: They pay money to someone to supervise them as they produce a portfolio full of work for which they will not be paid.
But once they graduate they get the Art School Seal of Approval, which is what they are paying for.
Not true at all. To get a top job in most professions you need a four year degree from a 40k-a-year school. If you want to be a designer who charges 30k per website, all you need is a portfolio proving you can deliver on your promises.
Doing three websites for free or cheap over a 40 year career hardly strikes me as exploitative. Especially since the winner of this contest is going to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of free publicity.
Uh, no?
I suspect the time and energy Tim spends trying to organize the book contest, look through the submissions and filter out the garbage would have been better spent just contacting a reputable designer and paying them to do a good job.
Maybe he's not expecting professional designers to submit their best work.
If an artist has good samples of the exact type of work I will be hiring them for, spec isn't needed. It really has nothing to do with a perception of artists as cheap talent.
But, there are programming contests. They are fun, not insulting.
Do you know the term "Luddite", meaning someone that's technologically backwards? It came from loomweavers who protested and actually broke mechanized looms that made weaving (and thus clothing) much cheaper. Not too long ago, people bought or made a new shirt every year or two. One shirt. You wore it all year, and patched it up if it tore. It was expensive! It all hand-weaved.
When mechanized looms came in, it sped weaving up - clothes got a lot cheaper, but less weavers were needed. Many weavers didn't like that. Some actually took to breaking looms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite -
"The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested—often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life."
Horse drivers protested cars once they started catching on too. This is how it goes. It's not a glamorous passing of the torch with dignity or anything like that. Design used to cost a hell of a lot, and now it doesn't necessarily.
But I sympathize. It happened to web designers too. The first website I had commissioned cost something like $13,000 and it wasn't all that long ago. (It was late and over budget - but the features were really good for the era. We had a scrolling news bar - I can't even begin to explain how cutting edge that was for the time)
Paul Graham sold Viaweb for $45 million. I had something with more power and fuctionality put together only a few years later for $13,000. Now you could get similar quality for $500-$1000 professionally, or hack around with a CMS and do it for a couple hundred bucks yourself.
But I imagine a lot of website designers and coders lost their jobs, or changed the way they did business. It was a gravy train for a while - now, not so much. I can imagine that there's a designer somewhere throwing darts at a picture of Matt Mullenweg, saying, "Curse you and your Wordpress! Curse you! Curse you to hell!"
For tangible products, I still pay for design I know is good with someone that can capture emotion very well. But if it's just a project I'm slapping up and come what may, I'll Elance that sucker and get 10 potential, slapped together designs for $50. I'll spend another $20 to $50 to iterate on that and it'll work to start. Actually, forget Elance these days - 99designs.com looks like the future. Fellow Hacker Newser bobz turned me onto the site - it looks pretty amazing for getting a passable design done on a budget.
But I do sympathize. Progress is all the consumers of society, but it can be painful for the people who produced the old way. You can look at the legacy airlines or United Auto Workers or farriering (horseshoeing) or swordssmiths or "workstation" style superpowered computers, or any number of things. People had to radically change how they did their work, or change their work, or not work.
I sympathize. A good designer is worth a hell of a lot, and the proven, world class designers will continue to be paid well for highly leveraged projects.
The price pressure for the bottom is here to stay though - people in rural parts of developing countries, high school kids and maybe even middle school kids, people just casually screwing around who don't care about the craft... and, maybe even, some people who work fast and can put out a first iteration in 20-30 minutes, and revise it in another 20-30 minutes, and win a $200 contest 1/4th of the time they enter. That'd be $50/hour in money and they'd have a huge portfolio that they can use to revise on as templates for jobs or sell as stock design afterwards.
The old way is gone. The new way will work once we all adjust. But we ought to sympathize with the plight of people who are forced to change through no fault of their own - change is typically hard and unpleasant, and you and I will curse the next time our fields change as well.