A little exposition
Earlier this week, the folks over at Carsonified managed to stir up a bit of an unintentional fuss when they started a design competition on their blog. The resulting flame war waged over the issue of what constitutes “spec work” vs. what constitutes a “PR opportunity”, and managed to completely avoid mentioning what I think is the real problem with “opportunities” of this type in the year 2009.
Hold up, Ebenezer. What's wrong with entering a design competition?
Absolutely nothing. Let’s get this straight. You’re a creative person, for whom work well done is its own reward. It would be fun to enter a competition, even when there will probably be no material reward for doing so. It’s more productive than garden-variety procrastination, right? But I shall try to put this kindly, as I do not wish to cause unintentional offense: If you think that the most efficient way to promote yourself is to design something for somebody else’s brand, then you need your head examining.
More specifically, if you think that the best place to publish that work is on a slide, in a room containing a finite number of people, during a break when nothing of interest is happening on the stage and everybody is clustered around laptops enjoying the conference’s corridor track, then be serious. What do you think the conversion rate from peer/competitor to paying customer will be in this case?
Holy crap, people. It's 2009.
I don’t care if you’re a coder, a UX specialist, a semantics geek, a DBA, an artworker or an illustrator. You should not be waiting on ideas from competitions or design briefs. If you sit doing nothing until a brief lands on your desk, you’re a vending machine with lungs.
At Videojuicer we have a hiring policy for developers - personally-motivated work inspired by the need to solve a pre-existing problem, even a minor one, will always trump equivalent commercially-briefed experience when it comes to choosing candidates. We weight our decisions in this manner because we want people who identify problems and then go on to give a crap about solving them. We do not want people who sit helplessly on their hands until the problem is broken down for them.
Competitions create an illusory line between the judging and the judged. In reality, that line vanished the day universities started running ethernet to the dorm room. Indeed, the development community today is democratised to the point of closely emulating the scientific community’s approach to peer publishing and review, and those practices are not lagging far behind (if at all) in the design best practices, accessibility and user experience domains.
The Internet worked. Value by affiliation is dead. We should be conceiving, creating and deploying ideas as rapidly as possible, selecting the ones that work for progression and speaking about the successes and the failures at geek meetups, conferences and in writing as much as possible.
Sure, throw out a competition entry or two. But do it for fun. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the best way to market your skills. You do not have to pander to anybody. Your work can stand on its own. Get on with your life, create the things you want to create and use those things to achieve your goals.
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