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Derek Powazek seems like a cool guy. He got screwed when he was ousted from his old startup, JPG Magazine, and has done a great job of keeping himself busy with his personal blog, other blog Magazineer and, now, his newest startup Pixish.
Unfortunately, Pixish is not cool. At all. It’s the defintion of spec work.
“Spec work” is when a buyer/client gets several designers’ unpaid work upfront and only pays for the work they deem best. One winner, a bunch of losers. Almost all designers are unabashedly against it. There’s No!Spec, Zeldman’s Don’t Design on Spec and the AIGA’s stance that “doing speculative work seriously compromises the quality of work that clients are entitled to and also violates a tacit, long-standing ethical standard in the communication design profession worldwide”.
The classic argument against spec work, and its wicked step-sister “design contests”, is that it’s like asking a bunch of architects to design the blueprints for your new house and only paying the one you like the best. Or, in the case of contests like the ones Pixish will be holding, you don’t even have to pay them, just give them a prize or something. “Ooh, an iPod shuffle! You mean I can keep it?!”
Derek and the folks at Pixish know this. They even added a response to it on their About page. Saying, basically, “if you don’t like the idea don’t participate” and, “pros like you are lucky, we’re giving talented amateurs a chance to make a name for themselves”. Oh, for crying in a bucket, here we go.
If the architects example is the classic argument against spec work and design contests, “giving amateurs a chance to make a name for themselves” is the classic argument for them. And 50 years ago it might have even made sense. Then there really was lots of talent and only a few ways to showcase it. Television, radio, movies. “You’re up against 300 other plate spinners. Good luck to you, little lady.”
But now we all know this is no longer the case. We’ve got, you know, the web. Blogs. Youtube. digg/reddit/lots of other lowercase social sites. There are no longer just three ways to showcase your talent — there are three bajillion. And if you aren’t getting noticed, sorry, you either aren’t trying hard enough or you suck.
Pixish isn’t going to make any pros out of amateurs. I don’t imagine it’s going to do much of anything for anybody. “I saw your work on Pixish and wanted to offer you this highly lucrative job!” “Oh really?! Thanks Pixish!”
I respect Derek and I certainly respect how hard it is to come up with a great idea and execute on it. I’ve had a lot more failures than I’ve had successes trying to do that exact thing.
But, plain and simple, Pixish is trying to capitalize on spec work on a massive scale. Spec work is bad. Therefore, Pixish is massively bad. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a backlash against companies that use Pixish. Emails to CEOs, petitions, etc. And even if there’s no real retaliation against the companies that use it, I know I for one will never participate. And I really hope no one else does either.
Update: Here’s the follow-up post with comments from Derek.
posted around 10pm on Sun, Feb. 10, 2008