Over at UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, co-editor Steve Delahoyde calls our attention to a new iteration of the “no spec” debate involving Tim Ferriss (right), the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. It seems Ferriss invited the world at large to design a cover for his next book, “tentatively titled Becoming Superhuman,” with a promise that he’d pick four favorites and give the designers $250 each, but no guarantee that it would actually be chosen for the cover. In fact, he explained:
“The publisher’s in-house design team, a few freelancers, and I have been working on tons, and I mean tons, of different cover options. This means that there is a distinct chance we might have tried concepts you might try. Please don’t assume we stole it if things look similar. It’s not in my best interest to screw anybody, and it’d be idiotic to do it so publicly. That’s not how I roll.”
But, just in case, entering the competition basically entails a promise not to sue Ferriss or his publisher.
Anyway, various designers criticized Ferriss for basically asking them to give him free samples, to which Ferriss replies, “If you don’t participate by submitting, it is impossible for me to exploit you.” Fair enough… but then Eric Karjaluoto comments from the sidelines, suggesting that, although Ferriss claims “to help people live their best lives through efficient use of time,” this crowdsourcing competition “individually squanders the time of many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people.” To Karjaluoto, the whole thing smacks of a buzz-building stunt from a canny operator who’s “pretty good at seeming like a misunderstood nice-guy… [and] abusing his ‘micro-celebrity’ status at the expense of those just getting started in their careers.”
What do you think?