As a professional graphic artist, I get a lot of well-meaning emails from friends and family alerting me to poster, logo and other design-related “contest.” You know, “crowd-sourcing.” These usually sound like great opportunities – a good chance for “exposure,” something to put on the resume, and at the very least a nice portfolio piece.
Actually, crowd-sourcing contests are predatory, offensive gestures that save the company doing them a little money while taking a huge amount away from professional artists everywhere. I consider them on par with punting a kitten into heavy traffic.
Imagine walking into a grocery store, opening packages up right off the shelf, and eating out of them. After defiling an entire aisle of, a manager confronts you. Your explanation? “I’m crowd-sourcing my meals! I’ll buy whatever tastes the best!”
After they were done punching you repeatedly in the gut until you vomited up every morsel of stolen food, you might realize this was an unethical way to go about picking dinner. All of those items cost the store money to stock, as well as labor to bring in and shelve. Time and effort went into the very decision to stock those items, and the wages of the people who got them there depend on their sale at a fair price. You took that money away from them to save yourself the comparatively-meager cost of purchasing a few things to try. You’re a miserable human being and hanging is too good for you. Well, you’re kind of a dick anyway.
So what does that make both the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee?
Late last year BOTH of these bastions of American Liberalism announced “contests” asking artists to design posters for them, for free. In exchange, the artist to submit the poster they liked the most got a prize! Was that prize, I dunno… fair compensation for their time, effort and skill as artists, with market-rate royalties for the work and an agreeable transfer of rights to the image?
Ha ha no.
In the President’s case, the THREE winners (them’s good odds!) were promised “a framed print of their poster signed by President Obama and a limited edition of their poster… sold in the campaign store with proceeds benefiting the campaign.”
The DNC promised a framed print as well (not signed, gosh darn it) and $1 for every copy sold.
Let’s compare this to what I’m typically paid for jobs no where NEAR these in terms of scale of distribution. As a young artist still in the early days of his career and not terrifically in-demand, I can charge the equivalent of $45-an-hour for most projects. I raise or lower this rate depending on a number of factors: Most important to the decision is how much the client stands to profit from my work, and how many of my rights to the work I’ll maintain according to our contract. $45 an hour is not a lot of money, believe it or not. You have to keep in mind that I am self-employed, so I pay all the taxes on my income that your boss pays for on yours, in addition to paying the part you pay, and I pay for my own “benefits package.” That $45 is my wage, overhead, health insurance, retirement, income tax, Social Security, paid vacation, sick time, paternity leave, bereavement leave, and office supplies. It must stretch to cover my non-billable hours (like the time I’ll spend speaking with the client before a contract’s even signed, billing them, processing their check and taking it to my bank). The current rule of thumb is that, as an artist ANYWHERE in America, you should never accept less than $35 an hour – that’s the minimum wage of our industry and taking less injures both you and fellow artists in your market.
That’s right: The amount of money you agree to as a freelancer impacts the amount of money all other freelancers can expect from that client forevermore. And clients talk to other potential clients. Business is a culture, and culture spreads like warm mayo. As a professional artist, I care deeply about what my fellow artists are charging for less-than-empathetic reasons.
But overall, you should be damn sure I’d charge more than that for a poster that would sell thousands of copies, and I’d expect 10% royalties on each sale.
Back to those “contests.” The “payment” in those cases is a copy of your own goddamn art, which is only of value as compensation if you sell it. The Obama campaign apparently thinks letting you know they’re profiting from your art without your benefit is an award in and of itself, which is a sentiment that makes me hope someone leaves a thumbtack in our President’s shoe. The DNC’s $1 royalty might be considered a decent rate… if they sell the poster for $10 or less. We have no clue what they intend to sell it for, however.
But the smelliest part of all this isn’t what the winners get – it’s what the losers get. Or rather, don’t.
When I’m hired to design anything, from a poster to a logo to a website, I submit a handful of ideas. The client looks at them and picks what they like from each, we talk, and I create a final. I get paid. But if they don’t like any of them, or for some other reason the project doesn’t make it past the idea phase… I get paid. If I do create a final, but for whatever reason the client doesn’t end up using it… I get paid. I’ve been screwed into taking “kill fees” in the past, but even then I GOT PAID. If I hadn’t, I’d have been working “on spec.” Only the evil dead work on spec, and only horrific necromancers from beyond Hell “hire” people on spec. “On spec” means your submitting work in the hopes of getting paid for it.
Sound familiar yet?
“Spec” work is a creative professional’s greatest enemy, worse even than “work for hire” (work where you retain no rights of any kind for the finished product, but hey, you got paid). The modern “crowd-sourcing” trend of holding “contests” for creative material is SPEC WORK, plain and simple. It is taking money out of our pockets. Because every time an artist works on spec, it devalues all creative work everywhere.
In an open letter to the DNC, The Graphic Artist’s Guild makes the point best by quoting their own words back at them:
“The Guild thinks the DNC needs to realize how ironic this contest actually is: A crowdsourced contest soliciting free work (spec work) from American artists for the purpose of ‘building a better future’ and creating ‘opportunity’… to work for free or be underpaid for our work.”
The Obama Campaign’s sin is even more ironic: The poster in question is intended to promote Obama’s American Jobs bill, and is called “A Poster Contest to Support American Jobs.” What jobs, exactly, is he supporting? Because apparently he couldn’t give a shit about mine.
