99 Design and Design Contest are two of the web's biggest speculative design sites.

Speculative work and in particular design contests are a hot topic on the design world at the moment. With the economic climate in its current situation, and work all too hard to come by, businesses are cashing in on vulnerability of fledgling members of the design community to submit pieces of work for free. While the prospect of a cash prize is incentive enough for some designers, others say it is damaging to the industry; for both designers and clients.

What is spec work?

Speculative work is when a designer is asked to submit work to a client before entering into a contract with the client. Designers will be given a brief and asked to submit preliminary work before the client agrees to take them on and pay them for their completed work. If the client does not choose to use the designer after seeing their preliminary work the designer will receive no payment. It is not uncommon for design agencies to use this strategy. It is up to the individual designer to choose whether they want to spend time completing designs that may never be used or paid for.

Design contests

Design contests are one form of speculative work and are being used more and more commonly by organisations who attract potential designers by offering the possibility of winning a cash prize. Entrants submit their work, which may be used by the contest host regardless of whether the entry is a winning one. Some companies run competitions themselves (generally advertised on-line or in magazines) but more commonly, agencies such as 99designs, DesignContest and crowdSPRING (to name just a small selection) host contests on behalf of clients, and have designers sign up to them to enter their work in the hope of winning the cash.

Who owns the work?

There is a large amount of variation in the way these contests are run. Reputable companies will run their competitions with closed entries, usually sent in jpg form to an email address and only published once the winner has been announced and the prize paid. Winning entries become the property of the organisation hosting the contest once payment has been received by the entrant, and non-winning entries remain the property of the designer and are not used by the host without consent of the designer. Full acknowledgement published along with the entry ensures that the designs can be traced back to their original creator.

This is a far-cry from contest websites, who offer very little security over submitted work. Entries are available to view in almost full size and can be easily dragged into Photoshop and edited, without even logging into the site. The sites themselves warn about penalties for members who plagiarise designs, but there is nothing stopping a member of the public from browsing the site and using submitted designs.

There is no mention of any external regulation of contest sites. Obviously the success of the sites rely on their ability to attract clients who will pay for work and designers willing to submit to the site. This means there is a certain amount of responsibility on the part of the contest site to internally observe and penalise designers who plagiarise, however, it is impossible to prevent the general public from copying or using any if the designs for their own use, and unless they were a huge multinational company, it would probably go completely unnoticed. Even if a designer did spot their design being used by someone else, there would be very little chance of proving where it had been plagiarised from. Designers who submit work to contest sites should be aware that they are basically giving up all rights they have to their own work and placing it in the public domain! Further to this, the lack of external regulation means that there are no consequences for contest hosts who fail to select a winning design or pay the prize, other than suspension or exclusion from the contest site. There is nothing stopping them hosting contests on other sites.

The arguments

So why are there so many contest sites and why does speculative work seem to be so popular amongst the design community?

Design contests enable designers to produce work casually, when it suits them. The huge number of contests run means that designers can enter as many or as few as they like and work remotely, or from home with no obligation to fulfill contracts or stick to deadlines. As one site put it “a great idea can come from anyone, anywhere – whether they’re a janitor by day and a designer by night or a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t have the time to run her own web studio” (crowdSPRING). Many fledgling designers feel design contests are a good way to boost their portfolio and gain skills and experience in a competitive industry, and many students enter design contests in the same way.

Many of the contest sites are “started by designers for designers” (99Designs) and entice the designer in with strap lines such as “click to satisfy your craving” (DesignContest)…they are actually doing the designer a favour; because the designer really just wants to be able to design. So, design contests such as these provide a platform on which designers can practise their art, with the added bonus of the possibility of a cash prize.

One claim is that the competitive nature of the sites “push the limits and create innovative new designs” (DesignContest), so they are really doing the industry a favour aren’t they?

Some would disagree.

By offering cheap, or even free labour some designers feel that contest sites are actually harming the design industry and benefiting no-one. Designs can be entered by anyone who can use the software and doesn’t necessarily have qualification or experience in the field. That is not to say that all designs entered into contests are of a poor standard, in fact quite the opposite. Many of the designs entered are of an extremely high quality and integrity, and some feel that design contests that commission work for no payment are “degrading and minimise the value of the design and the value of the designers intellectual property” (carsonified.com/blog/tag/speculative-design-work/). Students coming into the industry are doing so with a mindset that it is acceptable for them to complete work and not expect payment. This could have a significant impact in a few years

At the end of the day, why would a client pay £30+ an hour for professional designs when they can simply offer a lump sum, while viewing an average of 70 designs per contest. Clients can even suggest improvements to several designers at the same time, who can read each others feedback and alter their designs until the client gets exactly what they want, and at the end of it only one of the designers gets paid anything for their time! It could be said that the prize does not equate to a fair wage for the number of hours work entered onto these contests.

In closing…

So are designers being exploited? Speculative work is a phenomenon rarely seen in other industries; where a client would expect work to be completed and not expect to pay for it if they simply didn’t like it. All professional designers have a portfolio and a client chooses a designer based on their previous work and their reputation. Why then does this seem to be acceptable practice in the design world? The lack of regulation within the industry compounds the problem of fledgling or vulnerable designers losing out on earning a wage for their hard work.

In closing, it is obviously up to the individual designer whether they choose to spend their time working on designs and submitting them knowing that there is the prospect of not receiving any payment at all, however, there should be regulation like in any other industry to ensure fair play by clients and designers.

Update

An intersting take on the subject of Spec Work. They also have a very good collection of spec design work articles about the subject as well.