Pixish is Spec Work, Not a Boon for Designers at Any Level
UPDATE - Derek and his crew deserved the benefit of the doubt Scott mentioned in the comments below. They have deleted all design-oriented assignments and focusing completely on photos and illustrations. That’s a tremendous response, hats off to that group.
Adam Howell sums it up much better than I can in his Pixish is Spec Work pork. I get tired of going over and over this ground, but the truth is damn simple. Spec is evil, it’s not a good deal for any of the parties involved and ultimately hurts design/designers across the board.
Young designers are being preyed upon by unsuspecting ‘Johns’ looking for some cheap, quick design work. No one is fulfilled and we all lose a little something along the way - designers no longer value their work, hell they are giving it away after all, clients don’t value the work since they are paying nothing for it and the community exacerbates the problems of commodity content which extends to wholesale website design piracy, uncredited photo use, etc. Why not it’s not worth anything anyway right? Wrong.
Although I generally agree that Pixish amounts to spec work and completely agree that spec work is the antichrist, I am willing to let Derek and crew sort out the details and find a way to make it work.
I do find it odd that this issue wouldn’t have come up as a serious one while they were working on the idea and prior to launching the beta. Time will tell what’ll end up happening but I’ll be keeping my eye on it in the meantime.
I see no glory in demonizing Derek or the effort, but my concern is that his credibility in the design community makes this a much bigger issue and much more high profile. Personally I feel that I’m too involved in AIGA and other arenas to be silent. Not that I’ve ever been silent on much of anything…
I didn’t have much direct skin in this game, but was so glad (though not surprised) to see Derek and the Pixish crew so engaged in the discussion. It’s a pretty good case study for how to handle things when your product launch quickly leads in an unexpected or unintended direction.