You know, I understand the constraints of projects like this and I certainly appreciate your drive to produce a logo that meets and exceeds the goals of the organization, but come on... doing this on Spec is totally armature hour. Imagine going into a car repair shop and telling 12 mechanics at the dealership that if they fix the water pump on you Mini Cooper, and you like the work that just one of them did, you'll pay him for their time. Everyone else is SOL.

Shame on you and those working this way, it's pathetic.

The advice offered in Eric's article about the process are valuable, and worth keeping in mind. I'm personally conflicted about the contests site approach. I understand neophite designers wishing to break into the business will use efforts like this to get their name out. You can't prevent this from happening in the 2.0 logos for $100 culture we live in.

I'm also not sure about the chosen logo(s). I think the figure silhouettes with the words 5 alive would work better without the "periodic table" box. Goes to more of the purpose of the site, to help teens in crisis (a great cause, by the way).

Just go to Craig's List and see all the people who want free design/photography/modeling, etc. in return for portfolio photos or being on their website--BFD. I'm sure the first day the website is up there will be a million hits, and people will be clamoring for your design genius.

If you can't afford to pay for design or photography, you shouldn't be in business. Something this major should be factored into your budget. If you're a needy non-profit, find someone willing to do pro-bono work. Or use clip art/stock photos/friend with a digicam. We creatives need to eat and pay the mortgage, too.

Next time you go to the doctor why don't you tell him that you can't afford for him to do surgery, so maybe he can recommend someone who will do it for free? I'm sure you will get great results.

Just say NO to spec work!

Most of the comments posted so far are pathetic and disgusting. Thank you Eric, for being brave! Non-profits have enough trouble raising money to do the great work they do. I have to applaud them for having a budget and finding a way to stick to it. Corporate America could take a lesson there.

Gosh, everyone is so serious. In addition to the need for a logo for a non-profit, I also used Sitepoint (as I should have pointed out more clearly in the article) as an journalistic experiment...so I could report back to the gentle readers of creativepro. I learned a lot and I hope you gained some insight into this end of the biz, which, like it or not, is here to stay. I don't recommend spec work for pro designers (if you read to the bottom of the article, you'll see what I do recommend), but spec can be useful for creatives trying to break into the business or improve their chops. We may not like it, but the Internet is changing the way everything is bought and sold. Our choices are clear: we can huff and puff or change our business model to reflect the new realities. I suggest the latter.

-- Eric J. Adams, article author

As a professional I am against using a competition to obtain free or cheap design services. $250 dollars covers less than a day's work. I understand that you are helping a not-for-profit organization, but surely there is a more honorable way of obtaining design services, many studios will do pro-bono work for not-for-profit organizations. By using this site to obtain design services you are saying it's a reputable way to get free or cheap services. And it's not..

Spec work is unacceptable in the services marketplace. Philanthropic spec work is cost-intensive. Look how many revisions the student had to tender. Oh, I guess we all have to go through the learning curve. When the student becomes a professional (maybe), he'll know better. Charity does not begin with your hand in my pocket. It begins with mutual respect.

Eric, I really liked your article. What an interesting study. Your observations and advice were thoughtful, simple and useful.

As for SitePoint, if it had been around when I was getting started, I'd have jumped on it. What an opportunity to get some real work under your belt while the stakes are still low.

It's interesting that the negative comments here have been so airy; i.e., spec work is "bad," "disgraceful," etc. This is talk. It is not production. If you don't like spec work, don't do it. But spec is being done -- and it will continue to be done -- by free people making free choices in the pursuit of opportunity.

The world is not fair. It's better than that. It's alive. Go for it. Cream rises. Your work will rise or fall on its merits. But it will do nothing at all if for "ethical" reasons you never produce it.

This was passed on to me by an associate and seems fitting here:

More people are finding themselves in need of some form of illustrative service.

But what they're NOT doing, unfortunately, is realizing how rare someone with these particular talents can be.

To those who are "seeking artists", let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? ...none?

More than likely, you don't know any.And this is not really a surprise.

In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?

If you answered "yes" to the above, you're obviously insane. If you answered "no", then kudos to you for living in the real world.

But then tell me... why would you think it is okay to live out the same, delusional, ridiculous fantasy when seeking someone whose abilities are even less in supply than these folks?

Graphic artists, illustrators, painters, etc., are skilled tradesmen. As such, to consider them as, or deal with them as, anything less than professionals fully deserving of your respect is both insulting and a bad reflection on you as a sane, reasonable person. In short, it makes you look like a twit.

1. It is not a "great opportunity" for an artist to have his work seen on your car/'zine/website/bedroom wall, etc. It IS a "great opportunity" for YOU to have their work there.

2. It is not clever to seek a "student" or "beginner" in an attempt to get work for free. It's ignorant and insulting. They may be "students", but that does not mean they don't deserve to be paid for their hard work. You were a "student" once, too.

3. The chance to have their name on something that is going to be seen by other people, whether it's one or one million, is NOT a valid enticement. Neither is the right to add that work to their "portfolio". They get to do those things ANYWAY, after being paid as they should. It's not compensation. It's their right, and it's a given.

4. Stop thinking that you're giving them some great chance to work. Once they skip over your silly ad, as they should, the next ad is usually for someone who lives in the real world, and as such, will pay them. There are far more jobs needing these skills than there are people who possess these skills.

5. Students DO need "experience". But they do NOT need to get it by giving their work away. In fact, this does not even offer them the experience they need. Anyone who will not/can not pay them is obviously the type of person or business they should be ashamed to have on their resume anyway.

If you your company was worth listing as desired experience, it would be able to pay for the services it received. The only experience they will get doing free work for you is a lesson learned in what kinds of scrubs they should not lower themselves to deal with.

As many in the creative field surely knows, allowing spec work on any project is detrimental for anyone trying to make a living. To encourage it is to set back efforts by designers like me to be seen as a legitimate field. Where a client will ask us to work for free in the slim hope of pay, they would never ask a plumber, architect, etc to work on a project for free so they can pick and choose between submission. This was irresponsible.

Rather than continue to feed the raging fire that is spec work, why not send out a "call for portfolios" to designers looking to take on a pro-bono project? I, myself, accept at least 1 pro-bono project each year - more, depending on the size of the project.

Yes, this is a good cause. And if approached, it's something I would have seriously considered working on - pro-bono. But having a spec contest means a lot of talented designers out there did a lot of work for nothing. Which demeans those of us who do this for a living.

Being a designer is a legitimate career, but by supporting spec work, you're adding to its demise.

www.no-spec.com

"Editor's note -- We understand that Eric's controversial choice may generate strong reactions from readers of this column. We hope you share those by clicking on the voxbox icon to the left of the article. We'll be monitoring the conversation closely."

"Hello catzzz,
Please note that creativepro.com didn't go to Sitepoint; Eric did. His decisions and actions are his own.
Terri Stone, editor in chief"

Ok, I'll share away ...

For the record, my comment, "granted, it might have been a lack of knowledge about the design industry," was tongue-in-cheek.

"His decisions and actions are his own".

Eric is a contributing editor of creativepro.com. He's been here awhile. He 100% aware of the controversial choice he made (hope he enjoys the hits).

But it didn't seem to me that Eric was writing for creativePRO.com. It was more like creativeDESIGN-HACK.com.

Eric says it was an experiment, but he has two glaring statements that just do not sit easy.

1) "If it weren't for this struggling non-profit, I wouldn't have worked this way."

Eric, an editor of creativepro.com, knows all about hiring designers to work pro bono in a non-profit situation. Yet, he clearly advocated going to a spec competition site for this reason.

Did he write on how to work pro bono? Did he write on how to hire designers to work pro bono?

No, he pointed everyone to Sitepoint, with a teensy blurb at the end of a two page article - "It's the value-add of consultation and high quality that will differentiate you from what is becoming, regrettably, a mass market for design services." Easy to miss tucked down at the end, yes?

2) He also gave the typical excuse, "But because our budget is so small, we knew we couldn't afford the usual logo-design process. Instead, we posted our specs on Sitepoint."

Well done. It's an excuse we've been trying to educate clients and young designers away from for years.

But, like I said, this is just my strong reaction. As you requested.

Catherine Morley
Creative Latitude
NO!SPEC

Eric obviously took advantage of a situation and abused it to a T. I'm suprised that Creativepro would even give this any sort of play at all.

I'm all for helping out non-profits. Its needed, and often times deserved, but competitions is not how this should be handled. If you have a good cause, pitch it to a firm that you believe in. Not every firm will design for "free", but the majority will help a great cause. Many of the top Doctors in the world donate their time. Top law firms in the world do plenty of pro-bono work. Just ask for help. Sale your idea.

...and what a great non-profit idea. BUT, I will never give them any sort of assistance or funding knowing that they've de-valued design as a profession.

I'm a dinosaur in the industry and this all smacks of when typesetters, color separators and exclusive photo usage contracts roamed the earth. Where are they now? Only the best are still around. Over the years designers have become kerning kings, channel champions and stock-photo fiends. We are responsible for single handedly wiping out many industries by doing it all ourselves. Are we so special that it can't happen to us too? This industry changes and changes BIG. We all get it, spec work is bad... so don't do it. But the genie is out of the bottle. Sitepoint is going to survive with or without us. As long as there is someone who gets Photoshop Elements for Christmas – there will be hack designers and their very own showcase like Sitepoint. And as long as there are serious professional designers dedicated to producing solid corporate identity solutions for payment or pro-bono – we'll have our showcase too.

As contentious as the whole process was, I can't believe the organization went with a logo that was a ripoff of the latest Adobe Creative Suite identity. How creative is that? But I guess "original" wasn't in the design specs.

I agree with Terry-if you want charity, ask for it. There are plenty of talented designers who would do the job pro bono. Sites that encourage spec work on the cheap are lowering the perceived value of what we provide. Because of sites like these, when speaking with prospective clients, I don't even refer to myself as a designer any more. It's like having a sign hanging around your neck that says "kick me, please". Doing spec work insures that someone will indeed kick you. If the designer gets chosen by you because they're willing to 'go the extra mile' for $225, that means they've won the distinction of receiving the most abuse from you. Personally, I'd feel much better about donating the time to charity than I would about doing the work under the assumption that you had paid fairly for it.

I agree with some of the others that there are plenty of good designers who could have designed a logo pro-bono within their own processes and would have probably produced something more memorable.

Sites like this just encourage bad business practices and de-value the value of design and its process.

We never "toss up" a bunch of designs for our web site clients or potential clients to look at. You are just asking for them to be "stolen". Even after a contact is signed, we work on one design at a time. If they don't like one, we go to the next. We don't even waste our time on RFQ's if we know there are a lot of designers competing for them and/or it will take hours or even days to complete when we are sent a multi-page document outlining their desires. NO THANKS! We've got enough work.

That bit of hyperbole aside, spec is almost always bad for everyone involved. If you're the client, you almost certainly did not get the best quality work. If you're the designer, you almost certainly got taken advantage of, no matter whether you actually got paid a piddling amount or not. Spec is the tool used by those who want something for nothing, or next to nothing. There is just no substitute for actual designer/client interaction and nothing better focuses the mind of both clients and designers than sitting across the table from one another when money is on line.

The fact that a client is a not-for-profit is no justification for spec. Not-for-profits have been one of my primary client groups over my career. Nearly all of them have plead poverty at one time or another. At times it's true to varying degrees, sometimes it's not true at all. Common to many of them is the inability to see themselves as actual businesses. But that's what they are. They may not be selling a traditional product but, most assuredly, they are selling something - whether it be awareness raising, safety, skills, education, health, etc. And, just like any other business, they should pay their way.

I try to be as cost-effective as possible for these clients, but I don't do spec work and I don't do work for free. First, if the client doesn't pay for it they have no real appreciation for the true value of what you've provided to them. Second, spec and free work frequently results in disaster from an identity standpoint. I've watched a number of not-for-profits accept "free" work from one do-gooder after another. But, after spending $800 of their time on a newsletter the do-gooder's interest frequently wanes, or they simply cannot afford to do it again. So, someone new does it next time, and someone new after that, and eventually you can no longer tell that these newsletters are coming from the same organization. And the posters look different from the brochures, and the brochures look different from each other, and they all look different from the website and who knows what the logo is really supposed to look like anymore. It's all absolute dreck and it detrimentally affects community support and fundraising.

And, finally, no matter how well we promote our value and customer service to clients, for the most part, they don't get it and they never will. In a Wal-Mart world of the low price wins out, the design field is really just too esoteric to be comprehended very well by those who don't live it every day. At the end of the day, even my most appreciative clients, and there have been many, have never understood the complexities inherent in the field and have often unwittingly disparaged the sheer hard work of my efforts on their behalf with their oft-expressed conviction that my job is "fun".

They'll say, "Well, wouldn't you do this kind of work anyway, even if we didn't pay you?" Well, the answer is "Maybe...for myself. But definitely not for you." I'm a graphic designer to make a living. I have no expectations of wealth and, in fact, during my 20 year career I've never met a wealthy graphic designer. My expectation is simply to be able to trade on my talent, experience and skills to provide a decent living for myself and family. I don't think that's expecting too much.

See above.

No doubt Eric is perfectly willing to post HIS job on SitePoint and see if someone is willing to take a little less money to do what he does? Hmm, Eric?

This is wrong in so many ways. Everyone here is gifted in its on right, but you will be either right for the job or not! Although I am a firm believer that experience is what builds a strong portfolio, unpaid experience is what makes a servant. Good job- you just taught him how to be toilet paper, instead of a graphic designer!

Even in art school I never but once-it was mandatory- participated in contests like that. The professors pitch it to you like it`s a great opportunity for learning, but I rather sell my art on ebay and get 10 bucks than give it away.