Spec work is evil and I’m surprised to see it promoted at Josh Spear, a place that normally promotes the value of design.
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/position-spec-work

Andy

Hi, Carmel, Thanks for the note re our project. Why are we putting forth this effort? We believe we will get a better result with a crowdsourced logo. We believe in designers learning from us, each other and the community.

And yes, for anyone considering this for design work themselves, please do realize that it is a huge effort, not to be undertaken lightly. Feel free to contact us if you want to learn more.

Andy, we obviously view this differently. Reasons this is not spec work:
1. This is a public competition, where everyone can see everyone else’s work.
2. We are collaborative with the designers via the comments on the design, and the way the competition is structured… winners each week move forward providing examples of what is important to us.
3. Based on the above, designers can submit as many times as they want. They can use the collaboration to continually improve their designs.

We can’t pay everyone for every submission, yes. However, the majority of the folks participating would not be able to submit if we chose an agency to design our logo. And, the designer at an agency would not directly benefit the way they will in winning our competition.

Overall, I’m sorry you feel this way. Our intent is not to harm designers, but to promote them!

Thanks,
Jana

Of relevant value: Erik Spiekermann’s blog post / case study of the unfortunate result of a logo design contest by the Spanish government:

http://www.spiekermann.com/mten/2007/08/viva_espana_or_what.html

Not that a design agency would never ‘borrow’ another logo design for a client, but the tendency for logo contest or crowdsourced talent pools to be somewhat shallow leaves more to chance than selecting one reputable agency or firm.

Good point. By not engaging a design firm in an appropriate manner, the Spanish government ended up with an embarrassing result, which is exactly what they deserve.

I wonder if Spreadshirt would trust their bookkeeping and legal services to a similar process and say that they’re “promoting” the fields of law and accounting.

I’ll be interested to see what they end up with. For what they’re investing, they could have had something done by a pro who focused on exactly their problem.

The AIGA | the professional association for design, does not condone spec work. It’s not ethical and it negatively impacts agencies and professional designers who embrace and do design for a living.

This contest is a call for spec work. While the winner may be compensated, some designers who put forth great effort will not, which means the work they’ve done is spec work. In the future, I hope that you will consider a “Call For Qualifications” and review designers’ previous work so that you can confidently select the most competent designer or agency to design for you.

Respectfully,

Mindy Nies
AIGA Colorado President
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/position-spec-work

Spec work is short for speculative work. If contributing designers have no guarantee of getting compensated for their designs, the work is by definition “speculative work”. Unfortunately, in this contest only one designer will be a “winner” and all other designers will create work they will not get compensated for. (Unless having your non-winning design(s) posted online as part of the “collaboration” counts as compensation. But I don’t think so.)

I’ not a big proponent of ’spec’ work either– I think it’s bad practice. With that said, we felt this competition was an opportunity for designers to get involved in something for a bit of fun.

Not all designers have the portfolios or collection of work to boast toward getting them a design job.

My hope is that some B and C level designers hop in, if they don’t win, they’ve got a real life case study to show.

Most designers don’t have real life case studies where they ‘went all for it’, just logos they did for their uncles soap company, or their own imaginary creamery.

@Alex,

You failed to mention that the original German logo (which was copied, though not as bad as simple bits earlier this year) came from a competition.

@Andy,
Competitions are entirely different from a potential client calling to request you design on spec. While I concur that spec work is bad, and can lead to hard times when running a business, I would argue that design competitions can be a good thing. They can lead to exploration of new ideas, a richer design community, and notoriety for the winning designer. Hell, Threadless.com is one big design competition and they are loved by the design community. Look, there is plenty of bad-expensive-design out there, as there is plenty of good-cheap-design. It’s the nature of the profession.

Thanks for the interesting debate guys. I think you nail on the head Noah, its not a simple as spec work is bad. There are good and bad examples of design contests, Threadless or la Fraise as already mentioned are examples of really popular communities that use this model. While design contests might not be suitable for designers at all stages of their career, for some its an excellent place to hone their skills and learn from their peers.

We’ve tried to write a very detailed brief and to tackle a lot of these points in our About section. As long as we’re open and honest with the designers about the terms and conditions and run the contest as fairly as possible for promotion of them as an artist, which we’ve tried to do with the prizes (interviews in Computer Arts, Computer Love, permanent thank-you page on Spreadshirt site along with usual paid prizes).