Flavors of SPEC Work

As a rule, the AIGA (as well as any designer worth their Wacom) is against SPEC work. You’re giving away your talent for free, opening yourself up to be ripped off, and making life more difficult for other designers as a whole. On the hole, SPEC work is bad. But is it ALWAYS bad?

When I was job searching, I had a potential employer ask me to do a redesign of a city’s web portal. They wanted working HTML pages, a news crawler at the bottom, new images and a fresh and flexible design. I wanted the job, and I was considering doing the assignment. I asked if this was a design for a client of theirs, and I was told that the city in question was not a client of this firm. It was while I was doing research for the project that I found a RFP (request for proposal) from the city in question for a portal site redesign. The RFP listed ALL of the qualifications, verbatim, that I was given by this potential employer. When I asked them about it, I was told that the three of designers competing for this position would have their site designs pitched to the city, and if the firm was chosen for the job, then the designer that produced the bid-winning site would be hired.

I withdrew my name, and, after some discussion with the HR person I was working with, I found out that the other two designers had done the same, but without the knowledge of the RFP. That’s a great example of bad SPEC.

But what about good spec?

I’ve been working as an in-house designer for the past few months, and I’ve been asked to produce materials that our clients haven’t asked for. Brochures, mailers, simple web sites & emails, and other items. All under the guise of showing it to them, and selling them on it once they could see and feel it.

Internally, I balked at this. Why the hell were we making things that nobody was asking for? Who was going to pay for it?

I didn’t like the idea of making things I wasn’t being paid for, and I thought it was a bad idea for my new company to be doing that as well.

Regardless, I made the items. Payroll stuffers about preventive medical procedures, post cards for regular yearly exams, and so on.

The clients loved them. Once we sold one to client A, 8 or 9 other clients wanted them too. This was good SPEC.

Our account execs, knowing the areas in which our clients needed help with their employee communication, were able to provide a solution to a problem that was only just beginning to show its head. It was pure SPEC work. None of these initial clients asked for this stuff to be made. Many of the hardly knew there was a problem to be solved. But, by looking out for our clients, our reps were able to see a need and meet it without being asked.

That’s not SPEC as much as it’s Customer Service. And service is what our profession is all about.

But why the need to make the product before we had sold it? Why not let the account execs sell the service, and then come to me for the design? The answer is simple: It’s hard to get people interested in something when they don’t know what that something is.

As designers, we forget that the rest of the world may not be able to visualize what the end result will look like before it has been created. As designers dealing with non-design minded people, we have to show them what we’re talking about. And handing a finished (or nearly finished) version of what you would like to do for them is a great way to over come the visualization barrier.

That’s not an excuse to go out and start SPEC-ing all the work you can find. People know what a web site is, so you should be able to show them your web portfolio and be able to communicate to them what you would like to do for them specifically.

However, not everyone knows what a health awareness poster looks like, or what a summary of benefits looks like. To most people, these documents can produced as simple Word docs, and printed out on the office laser printer. But showing what these pieces can be (colorful, glossy, well-organized, etc) can give your clients a glimpse at what they could be doing better, and can lead to whole new areas of work for you.

If y9u’re going to do work ups like this for your clients, it’s best to track your hours as you would for a normal job. Once you sell them the idea, you’ll be ready to bill them for it, and you’ll already have a good idea of the cost involved in that type of piece for when your other clients see it and want one just like it.

Little value-ads like this for your current clients may be skiring the edge of SPEC work, but even if they’re not interested, they’ll see that their designer is looking out for them, and is interested in helping the grow their business. You may not get paid for the design, but at the very least, you’ll insulate yourself from being dropped easily if things get tight.