Kindness: The only thing thing that should be free when it comes to creative work
| Several years ago, I went to a Design Madison event at Hiebing. Jessica Hische was the guest speaker. She is engaging and quirky, and has a wonderful sense of humor. She is also AMAZING at type design. AND, she can make a mean web site and has an established web presence. I have been furiously revamping my portfolio web site because I have been searching for summer internships (Check it out at Biesboerdesigns.com). I know it is not perfect, but I had to get some of my works out there in a more appealing way than with my old Flash layout (flash, as we know is a dying technology). I used some great free tools such as highslide.js because I am not so keen on javascript, and a simple semi-responsive layout built to fit on screens of all sides (perfect fluid width layout). | Anyway, during my search for internships, I recently re-encountered Jessica's Should I work for free? chart because I had been noticing again all the companies that host unpaid internships. Jessica is so wise! And intelligent! I think that it's blasphemous that designers and creatives have to put up with this in our field. I completed an unpaid internship in one of the most expensive cities in the United States (New York City) when I was 21 soon after the collapse on Wall Street and I don't think I would work for free for that length of time again. I hold a bachelor's degree and designers and artists have also paid lots of money to complete school in addition to the rest of the world, so I think that just because work is creative does not mean it should be unpaid. It is also work and requires skills and hours and hours of work. I am not wrong to say this or being egocentric about my work. People in the design field are required to have years of experience just like everyone else. We need the basic means to sustain ourselves such as food, water, and shelter. I am in the process of completing a master's degree, and I think that to work for free at this point would be to devalue my work. I think the bottom line is: if you value your work, you should NOT work for free. Thanks for the cute chart Jessica! Her piece is also available as a fancy letterpress print here |
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