Portland thinks you are a worthless idiot
Jul 15th,
2009
This is my entry for PortlandOnline’s online contest to redesign their site. Read on for some background on the story:
Portland Online – A Web site representing the city of Portland, a site that receives more than 2 million visits per month and includes over 140,000 pages, a site the city of Portland is holding a contest to redesign. How much money would you expect to receive for such a job? $25,000? $10,000? $3,000? $500? – Pshhhhh money! LOL!!1! You silly designer, you.
Portland, Oregon is asking designers to strap on their design boots and redesign their Web site for the payment of “a link to your site at the bottom for one calendar year.” A link. Don’t even think of money, you won’t be receiving any.
Design contests are insulting enough when they pay a nominal fee to the winner. Sometimes some people justify it by saying “well, if I win it’ll be worth it!” – not here. Your work is worth $0 to Portland, even if you win.
Needless to say, this has ruffled some feathers in the industry. Specwatch has posted on it with links to others criticizing this policy:
Spec work? Ur doin it wrong
Open Letter to PortlandOnline Refresh Committee
Dear Portland, just say no to spec work
City of Portland’s Message: We Don’t Respect the Creative Community
According to the design contest’s site, you will waive all rights to your work upon submitting it, you will have zero say in how/where the link to your site will be placed on the site, your link will only last for one year, you waive any claim to payment. But you do get that snazzy link! Imagine the traffic you’ll generate! Do you want people coming to your site knowing you just did a 140,000 page site for free looking for work? I didn’t think so.
Maybe Portland is broke? Nope. They’ve allotted $10 million in their 2009 budget for internal business improvements, including web improvements. This is part of a broader $90 million budget. Source: Lizzy Caston’s Open Letter to Portland
We encourage you to do whatever you can to spread the word that this is an unacceptable business practice that hurts both designers and the client. Email the contest coordinators to let them know that this is unacceptable. The Portland area designers deserve your help.
Contact Portland and let them know that this isn’t the best way to do business for either side.
Portland officials regarding policy:
Laurel Butman with Portland Management and Finance:
http://www.portlandonline.com/omf
Roy Kaufmann with Mayor Adams’ office:
http://www.portlandonline.com/mayor/
Contest Coordinators (rules, process, criteria):
Jeremy Van Keuren: jvankeuren@ci.portland.or.us, (503) 823-3772
Abby Coppock: abby.coppock@ci.portland.or.us, (503) 823-6965
Hopefully they’ll pull this contest in time, for Portland designers’, and their own sake. View the contest page at www.portlandonline.com/refresh/designcontest.
could I see it in a comic sans please?
Here is a comment
If you don’t like the rules or the lack of pay don’t do it. If you do like working for a link referal and want to then submit your work. Otherwise shut the F up. The rules are so simple by the way… Yes they really want you to design 150,000 pages you idiot. Or maybe they want a style sheet and global look and feel… Nah they really want you to produce 150,000 pages of content
Mr Real,
I’ve simply used the same language they have in the press release.
Also, the ‘no spec work’ campaign was chugging along so well until you came up with a rebuttal like that. Now we’re screwed.
Here’s $10 that you’re not in the creative industry and are not regularly asked to work for free and only be paid (or not paid, in this case) if you win a competition voted on my citizens of a community who have no qualifications to choose a winner.
I know how web sites work, which is why I know that web designers, even ones who only come up with a “style sheet and global look and feel” deserve to be paid for their ideas.
Your redesign of their site is fantastic and gets right to the heart of the issue of spec work. I hope you really do submit it. Thanks for a great post on an important topic to designers.
I have to agree with rick on this one. I feel like the general public absolutely underestimates the job of a designer and fighting spec work comes with the territory. There is no such thing as just a “style sheet and global look and feel.” That IS 150,000 pages. A web designer becomes the clarifier as well, usually picking up the pieces of the ones they design for who haven’t thought everything through. And who actually finishes this when you design this “style sheet and global look and feel?” Are they paying THEM? By no payment at all it says to a designer “What you do is great, but I could do that if I wanted to. I just don’t have time.”
Come on dont you have better things to do in your life then complain about this….if you dont like it then don’t do it….simple…get a life!!!
Yeah, sir, why DON”T you get a life. I know you have better things to do than to draw attention to a problem that plagues an industry you clearly are very passionate about (Hence your involvement with the site I am currently making a very insightful comment on — funny, huh?) How dare you waste my valuable web-surfing time with your pathetic attempts at saying something meaningful. Don’t you know that the internet is nothing more than a giant network of wires that makes it easier to share meaningless drivel with the masses? Now, some of us DO have better things to do, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to find some other websites to grace with my intelligent discourse. It’s a dirty job, but it’s all a part of keeping it real.
Sorry, I forgot to link to my website that doesn’t exist:
http://www.youreapoopyhead.com
Please feel free to visit if you wish to continue this discussion.
I’m surprised some of you are reading a designers’ blog when you clearly have no appriecation or interest in it. To think that someone could read a project brief, visit an existing website and know everything they need to know to do an adequate (let alone outstanding) job on a website as complicated as a municipality is absolutely ridiculous. Design is about much more than making something pretty. A project like the Portland Online site requires meetings and a lot of research to fully understand what the home page needs to accomplish. Once the structure is established, then you can put on the makeup.
Designers that agree to do work for free are diluting the quality and respect that the profession deserves. Clients begin to expect it because Joe’s Design Shop does it.
All I can say is you get what you pay for.
I also wrote a satire piece on the contest, here: http://ourpdx.com/2009/07/announcement-new-design-contest-for-pdx-creatives/
Folks,
My email address was recently changed and the old one is a misprint. The correct address is as listed above, except without the “_z”. Sorry for the confusion. If you emailed me at the other address, I did not receive it.
I’ll also take this opportunity to make a clarification: Abby and I run the administrative end of the contest and we’re available to answer questions about rules, process, crtieria – the nuts and bolts. If you have questions about policy, I encourage you to contact Laurel Butman with Portland Management and Finance (http://www.portlandonline.com/omf/) or Roy Kaufmann with Mayor Adams’ office (http://www.portlandonline.com/mayor/).
Thanks,
Jeremy Van Keuren
Office of Management and Finance
Portland, Oregon
Thanks for the info Jeremy. Will be updated.
Looking forward to see this process change industry wide so that clients (you guys!) can get top quality work, and designers (us guys!) can be compensated fairly.
Best,
Ricky
Part of Portland’s mythology about itself is that we’re full of starving artists, making a living from un-artsy day jobs, but who could probably do a good design job but don’t have the qualifications. So winning a contest like this could give their design resume a real boost that they’d never ever get through a formal hiring process.
Yes, it’s generally important to hire good people and pay them well for good work. Education and credentials are important… but they don’t guarantee a good job, and a lack of credentials doesn’t guarantee a bad job. Let’s face it, a designer is not like an engineer or doctor who needs to be certified for safety reasons. So it’s worthwhile, from time to time, to provide opportunities to talented people who didn’t have a chance to pay for four years of schooling. I have several non-design-professional friends who spend their free time “playing around with” web design. They may not be as good as a driven and talented AND educated designer, but they do a much better job of designing things than some of the professional designers I’ve worked with, who must have coasted through their design classes and done only the minimal work necessary.
Sorry if designers get this “work for the sake of a contest!” thing all the time, in inappropriate situations, but at least in Portland it does seem like a reasonably natural fit to the local culture.