Tuesday 1 February 2011

sellin' it






A couple of weeks back, twitter was-all-a-buzzing with Jessica Hische's witty flowchart http://shouldiworkforfree.com/.
I had a look and chuckled. There is nothing designers hate more than spec work.

But, when a recent active client of mine approached me to participate in an unpaid design tender, I saw more "now!" "chance!" & "further work!" flashes in my head rather than trusting my intuition to turn it down. After all, how could I? I am a fledgling, working at building my business, proving myself and need every opportunity to do so. Right?

Working with a comprehensive written brief and further feedback from an open-to-all-agency-anonymous-telco (have you ever attended one of those – just plain weird!), I enlisted a trusted communications partner (tx. again to justin@profis.ca) and invested a week or so of creative juice and prepared a few concepts for submission. In the end, I think we had a tight presentation. As with all spec work though, no direct client-feedback-dance to help steer, strengthen and spicen up the outcome cheated the results.

Not surprisingly, within a week, I received the dreaded "unfortunately,…" email and chided myself on not only failing to secure the winning proposal but setting myself up to spin down the dark and swirling "I am not worthy" vortex of the internal-gazing designer. After all, rejection is a cold reward for daring to risk. And so I ask myself: will I accept such an invitation again…?

I wonder.

2 comments:

  1. yes, learn and try again

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  2. risk -reward is like climbing a mountain, the way up seems hard but the way down is usually harder. It always brings you back!
    Papa John

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