SEE SAM SKETCH!

More sketches for work. And now for some housekeeping: first of all, happy birthday Mary Blair (and my cousin Daniela)! Second of all, I’d like to take a moment to address an issue that keeps popping up on my twitter feed and blog roll - the issue of whether, as artists, we should do work for free. I am very hesitant to ever do free work unless it is for a worthy cause that I sincerely believe in or if it is an unpaid internship, in which the experience is a form of payment. Recently both the Obama campaign and Moleskine have asked artists to submit their work FOR FREE, when both of these “companies” (I guess I can call the Obama campaign a company now… since companies are people under campaign donation law?) have more than enough funds to actually hire designers. To quote Rolling Stone magazine, “The design industry has been hit as hard as a lot of other groups… We need jobs too.”

Fellow artists, working for free can be a more seductive proposition than you might think - you may believe you are getting something more valuable than money out of the experience, but please, think long and hard before working for free, because “free” is a price that no one else can compete with. It forces all of us to lower our costs, and essentially makes making a real living out of art near impossible.

I should add that I love Moleskine notebooks and I most always vote Democrat, but this blatant dismissal of designers as real hard-working, job-seeking Americans by asking professionals to work for free is insulting. (And the poster for the Obama campaign is for JOBS CREATION, no less - the hypocrisy! Moreover, I would have expected Moleskine to have more respect for artist and their careers - sheesh!)

I’d like to quote Luc Latulippe’s Google+ discussion on this matter because he perfectly sums up the difference between volunteering for pro bono work and participating in a contest that asks for free submissions: “Spec-work should not be confused with volunteering, even—especially!—when disguised as a contest. Spec-work is about being asked to work for free, by dangling a tiny sad little rotten carrot as a potential reward. (“Hey you’ll get great exposure!”) If creating strong compelling graphics is important to a project or cause or business (in this case: promoting job creation, of all things), then why not treat seriously, and pay someone to do it right?”

Being an artist is a job, and creating art is hard work, hence the term artwork. Fellow artists, please don’t sell yourself short by buying into the idea that you don’t deserve to get paid just because you enjoy your job.