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? Read the rest of this entry »

My name is Kevin, and I’m a designer living and working in the Atlanta area. I’ve been here for a couple of months, and I’ve decided to start this blog. My goal is to make this site a place where I can write up some tutorials, and offer advice to young designers.

I’ll be covering topics such as dealing with client, contracts for designers, how to work print shops, and some basic design knowledge that you’re not taught in school, and maybe don’t know where to find. I want to help designers avoid some of the pitfalls and problems that I’ve encountered. I’m open to questions, and I welcome any and all feedback.

For my first post, I was hoping to do a write up on CSS and how to use divs in place of table elements. Instead, I’ve found a nice hot button issue to start us off: SPEC work.

Spec work, or speculative work, is something that, unfortunately, is all too common in our industry. Spec work is when a client asks a designer to produce work for free while dangling the possibility of payment in front of the them. A great example of this can be seen at times in places like the Craigs List Art/Media/Design Jobs section. They go something like this: Read the rest of this entry »