OK, this is a short ‘shout out’…
Anyone who’s been in the creative industry for some time and who also entered it as a qualified creative professional will know I’m about to bring the dirty subject of those ‘sites’ that enable designers (and actually other professions too) to bid on projects. Well I can only assume it attracts those with less qualifications (or quite possibly less morals) and to be honest my research has proven they are happy to purely ‘give it away’.
I have a simple question… would you give what you do away for a 10th of what it’s worth?
No, I wouldn’t either. But to get an insight into this online phenomenon that promotes freelance work you can bid for, I joined one (I won’t name) purely to see how it worked and what responses I would get for bidding ‘realistically’.
Ooh I can tell you it wasn’t pleasant, or exciting.
Oh come on now… I was quickly seeing bids for designing a 16 page brochure for under £15. I put in a ‘realistic’ bid, and you can guess what – no response. So who would work the hours required to produce a 16 page brochure (let’s put in a realistic figure here of 12 hours) for a whopping 93p per hour? Plenty I can tell you, some of the projects I looked at had well over 100 bids – well if that isn’t selling yourself I don’t know what is.
I had to hold back in emailing some of the project ‘posters’ to ask whether they would be (or are) happy to receive work for their project based on these figures. So I stayed on the site for 2 weeks just observing projects and bids placed as well as placing some myself just to see the response, but after that I felt compelled to withdraw – it’s just too saddening.
I’m really not sure if any designers with integrity can stem the flow of this online industry that seems intent on sucking the professionalism out of what we do – so any views are welcome!
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