There's a website out there that some of you may already have heard of – [link] Pixish.com - basically it invites clients (companies, individuals etc) to host artwork contests. People enter and the entries are voted on, the winner gets a prize.

Sounds fun eh?

Well, I'm sure many of us have heard complaints on DA contests about big companies basically getting spec-work from the DA community and giving trinkets in return. Whilst entering competitions is fun and we all like to get prizes, we also have to be a little careful in this particular arena because the things we're entering into the contest - our artwork - is actually something of value. No matter how amateur you think you are, in actual real fact, your artwork does have value. Maybe not as much as say, a Craig Mullins or ~ANTIFAN-REAL, but it does have some value nonetheless even if only the value of your idea for the content and layout of the piece. Additionally, most artists are actually better than they give themselves credit for, even if you think you’re not a professional artist, the work you produce may well be of pretty good quality. I know I’m sometimes guilty of that myself and say I’m not an artist, but even I have had people approach me and ask to use pieces for brochures and album covers o.O

Aaaaaaaanyway… If you already know what Spec-Work is, then feel free to skip reading the following

Sure it sounds fine at first, yay prizes! It's just for fun! But if you start thinking about it on a little higher level it becomes a bit fishy. Sure it's fine if all the contest is for IS fun, and there is no “real” end client, if it's just for say, designing a movie poster for a coming movie or the competition is oriented toward students and amateurs to help them build a portfolio or get critique, or perhaps its for a charity or local arts organization, that's absolutely fine. But when there IS a business end client who's asking for something they will be making money off, that is NOT OK.

Basically what Spec Work Contests does to hurt professional artists is that it gives a client a cheap way to get artwork (whether for a logo design or concept work) that they can use to make money from (either by selling it directly or using it to sell their brand/product) without compensating the artist properly. A lot of these contests have very small prizes, worth much less than what an artist would charge as standard, every piece of artwork entered took time to create by each individual artist, and only one of them will get any compensation. Now, I’m not saying that creating artwork for fun has no value, far from it. But creating artwork for someone else who intends to find a piece of work to use for profit and not getting compensation for it isn’t great, and when you’re looking at spec-work, it’s a LOT of artists creating work for no compensation. This hurts professional artists because firstly, clients start thinking that that is OK, they CAN just go to a bunch of different artists, ask for work and then not pay for it because they decide they don’t like it. Secondly, because all these artists are willing to do all that work for free, whatever the client does pick they don’t expect to pay very much for it.

Creating artwork isn’t like assembling a widget in a factory line. It’s not a case of just clicking a few pieces together and churning out 70 units an hour. As any artist knows, creating 1 piece of artwork can take a couple of hours to several weeks. And don’t sell yourself short, that’s not just a case of your hand moving the pen-tool or brush, that involves you thinking about it, planning the design and layout of the work, deciding on color-scheme… not to mention the years of study and practice it took you to be even able to do all of that. Sure you may not have spent 5 years in art school, but you have looked at art, you’ve practiced and learned different things just doing it at home, you have taught yourself. It takes skill and thought and time.

Imagine if you earn your living by mowing peoples lawns. You charge $40 a lawn, each lawn takes you 3 hours to do a really good job on. So you can only do 3 lawns a day. Along comes Joe who just likes driving his mower, so he offers to do peoples lawns for free. Sure, he’s not doing anything wrong. But do you think people will pay you the $35 you charge when Joe will do it for free? Even if you drop your prices, you can’t really compete with free… and what if you start doing a much faster job and charge less? Sure, you can now do 7 lawns a day for $10 each, but is your work going to be any good? And what if there’s now 10 other people offering to do people’s lawns for $10 each as well? What if your customers get 5 different people to mow their lawns and only pays the one they like best? How hard do you think it becomes to earn your living mowing lawns?

That gives you an idea, but then artwork is nothing like mowing lawns, it’s not just something people do to earn money, creating art is something that possesses you and drives you, most professional artists (in fact, most artists period) create art not because they can, but because they can’t NOT be creating art. It’s a drive, a passion, something that itches inside your skull and hurts if you can’t do it. I see my husband struggle & hurt every day because he’s not doing his art full time, because he has to have a “day job” that isn’t art-oriented. I see how clients who contact him are unwilling to pay even his rates, which are on the lower end of the scale, because they can get spec-work for free.

So, this is why spec-work is a bad thing, this is why it hurts artists. Already it’s hard for an artist to hold on to their work. We have the Orphan Works bill threatening, rippers online both professional and amateur… in fact, it’s easier for anyone OTHER than the actual artist to make money from their artwork!

Pixish itself seems to have innocent dreams of a world where happy artists create work and get rewarded. That’s awesome. But unfortunately allowing the hosts of the contests to set the terms is only allowing business clients to make money for free. Although Pixish lead chap Derek Powazek seems full of passion for his dream, he also contradicts himself about what the actual process is, which is worrying. I strongly feel that the dream is obscuring what’s really going on. Just as an example, in the same recent article Derek says the following:

“You do not lose any rights if you submit work to an assignment and it does not win. Publishers may not use any work from Pixish for any reason without marking it as a winner in an assignment.”

That sounds reasonable right? Ok… until he say’s this a couple of sentences later

“You're subject to the rules the publisher set, so check all the information on the assignment page before submitting.”

Can anyone see a contradiction there?

Here is a PRIME example… Jonathon Coulton, a musical artist I really enjoy and have supported by buying his music’s, he recently ran a contest on Pixish in the terms it clearly states :

“Just to be clear, any design that gets submitted to this contest may end up getting printed on shirts that I then sell and then give you zero dollars. But there are fabulous prizes. And of course I will be very grateful”

ANY DESIGN. Not “the winning design”… ANY DESIGN.

So basically, as good as this contest looks at first with its $200 value prize… JOCO has pretty much gone and gotten himself a ready made catalogue of t-shirt designs. For free. Sure it’s put in jokey language, but the actual legal wording sucks for every single person who entered. And if you look at the standard wording of, for example, any DA contest, there’s usually something in there that say’s “all entries become the property of the contest host”.

Derek tries to justify why Pixish isn’t spec work because spec work only applies to logo/templates, not artwork in general. And that because they don’t host contests that request logo/template design, that means they don’t support spec work because illustration and photography are not design.

WHAT?????

Here, let me have Derek speak for himself.

“Generally, when people talk about spec work, they're talking about design. Pixish is not really for completed designs. It's mainly for design elements: photos and illustrations that will be incorporated into a larger design project.”

Seriously… what???

“I admit the line between a picture and a design can be blurry, but here’s how I see it: Design is the combination of elements, created for a client, to be used as a whole. Pictures are those individual elements (photos and illustrations), to be combined by a designer. Pixish is for soliciting those raw materials - not completed design projects. It’s the difference between shooting a photo for a magazine and designing a completed page.”

So… Derek… you’re saying that the template for the page is more valuable and deserves to be paid legitimately, but the content is just stuff any schmoe can churn out and has little to no value.

I bet Annie Leibovitz would disagree.

Look, fellow artists, just please, don’t just throw your work away. You’re only hurting yourself and every other artist who is trying to scrape a living out of what they LOVE doing. Before you enter contests READ the terms, make sure the contest host is either a worthy cause or just for fun. If you have any doubts about it, DON’T ENTER. By all means do work for fun and for good causes, but don’t just give away your work to others who will profit from you whilst you get nothing.

For more info other than my babbling, check the following out.

Pixish Related
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Spec Work Related
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