Description:
Spec work, contests, crowd sourcing and design mills are arrangements where a creative professional produces designs for projects prior to securing an equitable fee agreement with their client. These arrangements can come in the form of contests promising the chance to win the project. The existence of design mills is a somewhat recent trend. They are companies that pit their “internal designers” against each other for creative output. The winner receives a small fee, while the company applies a large mark-up and passes it along to you.
Speculative work benefits:
Cheap to super cheap with an almost overwhelming amount of choices. If you can provide, market research, analysis, strategy and trends, you may luck out and find something that answers your creative brief. Also, if you know exactly what you need/want and you see the logo that you are envisioning, this may work well for you.
Speculative work drawbacks:
Companies and designers who enter into speculative work arrangements create an environment where design becomes a race to the bottom regarding design quality and price and you’ll ultimately get what you pay for. The sheer quantitative demand is impossible for new designers to keep up with and they resort to desperate measures. As such, you’ll encounter plagiarized, templated and inferior designs that don’t account for your strategic branding and design needs. This can obviously underachieve or even hurt sales for your company and potentially leave you exposed for copyright infringement.
Speculative work exploits the design community. The majority of designers do not get compensated for the work they do. As such, these companies generally attract inexperienced, under qualified talent. To a designer, the belief is that the probability of winning your project or contest is so low, they don’t really want to lean in for producing the most effective solution for you.
Finally, every market is different, requiring a different solution. A solution without any research, analysis, market understanding and observation of trends is not a solution at all.
Next step… The summary
