There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times (which, to be fair, was brought to my attention by Gizmodo) about artists and illustrators being asked by one of the largest and richest (and, until today, I thought one of the coolest and least evil) companies on the planet to develop custom skins for their popular web browser, Chrome, without being paid.

The argument is as old as time, it seems, "Do this work for us for free because we'll show it to a bunch of people and you'll get more work from that. Consider it an investment in your future." Normally you get it from people making student work, or people with no budget, or people who honestly don't see the value in creative work and don't see why they should pay for it. (And, for the record, the first two are okay. The last one can go fly a kite.)

That being said, there is a HUGE difference between a student asking you to appear in a film for free, or a non-profit asking you to do some pro-bono work and a gigantic multi-national corporation that made $1.42 Billion in profit in the first quarter of 2009 alone asking you to do work that will provide their users with value for free or "for the exposure."

As a concession Google has stated that they would be amiable to using an existing piece of work from the artists' portfolios, which also raises an interesting issue. Work done on commission is frequently owned by the client, or has had exclusive rights assigned to the client. Therefore the artist may not have the ability to allow Google to use the work. That's an easy one to overcome though, just don't use the pieces that you don't own the rights for. The more interesting implication is that although the work obviously had value to the original client, it does not have value to Google.

Which begs the question: Google, if you don't value the work, why do you want it? It's a pretty fair equation that governs the hiring of creative professionals. The client pays what it is worth to them. The artist or designer has the right to do or not do the work based on the value they assign to the time and materials they'll expend doing the work, or based on what the market is currently willing to pay for their work. In a good artist/client relationship those factors balance.

When you ask artists who have clients like Target, Nickelodeon and The New York Times Book Review to do work for free the equation is completely unbalanced. Someone is obviously willing to pay these people for their work. If they do work for Google for free, they are also not getting paid for the work they would be doing in that time if they turned it down. It's an Opportunity Cost (wow, I bet my college economics teacher would be surprised I retained that one).

Furthermore I would argue that Google proposed compensation (exposure) is silly at best and insulting at worst. Professional illustrators get exposure with every client. Especially illustrators who are big enough to be on Google's radar. Exposure is a given. Beyond that, I would argue the usefulness of the exposure Google is offering here. The people they're going to be exposed to are end users. A very small fraction of whom will be people in a position to contract the services of the artist. It's a far cry from agreeing to have your work included in a publication about illustration for no fee, or even doing a pro-bono project for your local Ad Club or AIGA. That type of exposure is useful. There the value equation is balanced, or at least more balanced.

Nope. In the case of Google's scheme to get highly skilled artists to do work for free, I'm afraid I just can't find anything to redeem them. The value equation is completely unbalanced, and the proposed compensation is doubtfully relevant.

I originally started writing this with the plan of demonstrating the evils of spec work and adding a little show of solidarity for the No!Spec movement, but the more I think about it, this isn't even spec, because the artists know they will never get paid. It's somehow worse than spec work, because even if the artists to incredible work that Google is extremely please with and is awesomely popular with their users, the compensation will never come from Google, the people they did the work for. The artist is expected to somehow nebulously account for business they get down the line as compensation for this project. That's not Spec. That's BS.

BTW - Although it's not necessarily germane to this discussion, ohTwentyone does support No!Spec and maintains a brief but emphatic policy on performing speculative work. It is: "We stand on the strength of our portfolio."