Moni is BACK!! Thank God for Moni with an intelligent, thought provocative and comment generating post! ( I swear to God, If I saw another f*** list of fonts or icons or ***** I would cut my ....) /rant

Very interesting.. I believe that 90% of work is ‘spec’ work
- applying for a job -it’s work, and, since you have no guarantee of GETTING the job, it’s SPECULATIVE..i.e. spec.

Doing a portfolio site =SPEC!

Commenting in various blogs and putting a link back to YOUR site. Thats WORK which generates traffic, so…..SPEC!

Doing a Proposal.. “How much is this gonna cost??” (you read the requirements (work)... you type up a response/bid (work).. you submit it and wait… SPEC!

We ALL do spec work, and often happily too.. the ire people feel is when they are FORCED to participate, when there are NO OTHER (viable) OPTIONS and the relationship is one sided and exploitative.  In other words, we all like HAVING SEX but nobody wants to be FU*CKED

To really battle spec work, we must always be constantly upgrading our skills and stay away from the real enemy: Complacency and technology. - There are canned effects in PhotoShop now, that ten years ago, doing by hand, you were a creative genius! Now everybody can do a perspective/drop shadow 3D effect - So therefore we have to be MORE than that, and always IMPROVED our selves and ADD MORE VALUE..

instead of being a ‘LOGO DRAWER’ ...improve yourself.. go two steps further and be a BRANDING CONSULTANT! -it’s not just the image, but what does that mean internationally? cross-culturally?? EVERYTIME before you talk to a client, do a little research on them, their particular industry, find a magazine specific to their industry, for instance, for PhillC , it would be “AssMunchers Quarterly”  LOL -skim through it and get caught up on the topical issues of the day for that industry! (For instance, the aforementioned periodical may tell you that Ass Hair removal and butthole bleaching are high growth areas! When you speak to your prospective client you will be able to speak fairly cleverly and sound like you at least did your home work!

Back to the article..that Crowdspring guy sounded like a real douchebag.. I’ll pick his comments apart later!

mark, glad you liked the news post. In all honesty this whole spec work issue interests me and i’m a firm believer that we should all do ‘some’ spec work, but also believe there are different degrees to it. When people participate in Spec work and it’s to their advantage they don’t complain, but when they knowingly participate and dont get paid, then they get annoyed. I think that’s where one of the problems stems from.

I’ll leave the rest of my thoughts out till i read what you have to say about what Ross answered, def looking forward to that though :)

yo Mark, you can go kiss my ass.
Anyway, Spec work, and it’s evil cousin “piece work” where a profitable job is pieced out into little mundane pieces and many people work on the pieces with no knowledge of the big picture, little money, and little creative input

THAT is the wave of the future, and its sickening, even more so than “spec work”