Chiming in on the spec work debate

So anyone with half a brain knows spec work is bad, wrong, evil and all of that stuff, but I’m of the opinion that the real weight of the argument is actually being lost amongst all the cat-fighting and bitching.

Working for free is obviously not a great idea and not a sustainable one either.

But, pitch work will never go away and I think it’s ok for an agency to spend a reasonable amount of time and resource putting together a demonstration (not a design) of their thinking relating to how they may solve or approach problems they can pull from that RFP.

Designing for a pitch (both on the visual and interaction layer) is insanely stupid for many reasons, but the biggest one of all is that beyond the RFP you have ab-so-fucking-lutely no idea what either the client or user needs or wants.

Anything you produce is pure finger in the air guess-work based on a number of assumptions. It destroys any credibility in the design process and relies on aesthetics to blow smoke up a clients arse.

This sucks not only for the agency but also for the client too. Would you phone up a kitchen shop and say “hello i’m interested in a kitchen?” then expect your perfect kitchen to be delivered to your house without A: measuring the room its going in B: finding out what you need to do in it C: how you like to do things in your kitchen.

What you’ll get is something that might look nice but won’t fit and ultimately work for what you need it to do.

Whichever working style you have, design is iterative. It is humanly impossible to nail a design problem at an interaction level and an aesthetic one in one hit.

Very often the argument falls back to “…well we have to show something” and “…this is what the client expects” - and to that I say bollocks. The client (unless they are painfully stupid) will respect your desire to do the right thing by them and their business. This is wholly a communication issue. No-one in their right mind would ever turn down the opportunity for something to be demonstrably and measurably better.

This isn’t the clients fault either. Proliferating this process won’t make it go away. There is an obvious need for education at agency level and for some genuinely creative ideas to help demonstrate due diligence before design even begins.