I have never hired a desginer without looking at a portfolio or getting at least some line drawings outlining their concepts. I read Jeremiah's post, and I think his point is valid: regardless what you believe is the positive/negative behind spec work, the practice is here to stay and will continue to grow.

All design type services commoditize over time. The effect of more people entering a space coupled with cheaper startup costs, causes supply to increase while demand tends to not keep up.

Also, your economics are outta wack. The purchase of a laptop and software and fonts are sunk costs. It also takes into account only that you are doing nothing but spec work, which is not true with any designer or service professional. In addition, since the purchases are one-time expenses, they amortize over their lives, which can be many years.

I also dont get the theft concept, but I figure thats your emotion, more than your reason.

Bottom line, be a designer that is good enough to not need to accept clients that require crowdsourced spec work. Or dont.

Cream rises to the top. Its happened in every industry, and design is probably the most frequently hit. (Gawd, I remember how expensive it was to get a website built in 2000 vs. today).

yawn.

Now, seriously… “Professional” designers (or whatever you call the category you are defending) are damaging their own image and standing by throwing mud at the lower end of the market. Clients (like myself) respect individual professional designers for their individual capabilities, but – I can assure you – have no respect for unionistic attempts at keeping competition out of the door. Furniture makers in North Carolina have had to retool or exit the market. Programmers have to deal with outsourcing. I fight every day with competition next door and half a world away. Why do you think you are special, and you deserve to be protected from competition leveraging different economics in other parts of the world with a new business model enabled by technology? What makes you think you can insult your clients by accusing them of unethical behavior, and get away with it?

Like players in many other industries have already done a thousand times, you should recognize that your business model can't effectively compete in the lower end of the market. In the long term, you'll win by doing that. And in the short term, you'd gain a lot of respect.

Peace, Andrew.

Now, seriously… “Professional” designers (or whatever you call the category you are defending) are damaging their own image and standing by throwing mud at the lower end of the market. Clients (like myself) respect individual professional designers for their individual capabilities, but – I can assure you – have no respect for unionistic attempts at keeping competition out of the door. Furniture makers in North Carolina have had to retool or exit the market. Programmers have to deal with outsourcing. I fight every day with competition next door and half a world away. Why do you think you are special, and you deserve to be protected from competition leveraging different economics in other parts of the world with a new business model enabled by technology? What makes you think you can insult your clients by accusing them of unethical behavior, and get away with it?

Like players in many other industries have already done a thousand times, you should recognize that your business model can't effectively compete in the lower end of the market. In the long term, you'll win by doing that. And in the short term, you'd gain a lot of respect.

Peace, Andrew.

Similar, but very different.

I'm all for globalization, but no worker should be expected to be paid for 5% of the work they do.

Hope that made you feel warm and fuzzy.

You have accused customers of spec work services to behave unethically — based on an ethical standard you felt you were entitled to set. You want to protect your ivory castle from market forces enabled by the very internet that has made your industry flourish. You want to deny market access to “competition” by people who have not had the same access to education and training you've had, who live maybe in India or Pakistan instead of Boulder.

And the zealot would not be YOU?

i.e. it is by no means impossible to plan on financing at least the computer (and perhaps the main software license) so say out of pocket costs of font packages ($500) plus a 24month or so financing on the compute and creative suite (i.e. $5000 – at a 10% interest rate that's $6000 over 24 months or about $250/mth)

so with those numbers someone might spend $1000 on fonts and other out of pocket costs and then need to cover $250/mth to finance the rest of their equipment. So that's about one or two spec projects a month.

Now that doesn't cover rent and other costs of life – and it does assume decent credit (though 10% interest rates isn't exactly a bargain)

And one further wrinkle to consider – most (all?) of these costs would be tax deductions as expenses (pretty clearly so) so depending on lots of factors (legal structure you worked under etc) the net costs for you might be a bit lower.

That's not to disagree that likely spec costs are lower in part because some portion of people don't pay for everything they probably “should” pay for (i.e. fonts and likely software licenses in many cases).

I also wouldn't be surprised if many people use student licenses obtained while in school to start their careers (whether or not this breaks the terms of those licenses I don't kinow)