In My Honest Opinion -- (I, MHo)

Spec Work Raises Questions of Fairness

Forbes promotes CrowdSpring in an article that describes the design service as novel way to get cost effective design work. But the question of “spec work” comes up again (via MeFi). Professional designers don’t like the idea of potentially working for nothing — since the design contest doesn’t pay everyone for their efforts, only the selected winners. Seems like there should be an easy answer to that — offer a bit of compensation to more designers and limit the contest to fewer participants. On the other hand, the compeititors know ahead of time what the contest is about, so it’s not exactly <i>unfair</i> to the designers. No one is holding a gun to their head to participate….