You didn’t ask them to make a free sign for you plumbing business. You offered to share your stage with them. Amazingly ungrateful of them and amazinly gracious and generous of you.

I suppose I could understand people complaining about free exposure not being fair payment but you said it a million times, you don’t even want it so you’re basically doing a favor to those whose work you accept.

Very interesting site by the way, lots of interesting articles.

I firmly believe that Trent had all the best intentions at heart.

If you are going to use an artist’s image….make the image itself a live link to the artist’s website. Also, drop in a credit line beneath the image with the artist’s name and a copyright symbol. It doesn’t help much if the artist’s name is not connected with the image. This was the case with the images of David’s that you’ve been using.

Brad

As a young designer, I know just the sort of spec work the designers and artists above are complaining about. Imagine the cigar-smoking man in an expensive business suit going on about an “opportunity of a lifetime” — even if that wasn’t your intent, that is the way it came off.

I’ll be the first to say that even just commenting on your site leads to more traffic for mine, not to mention a higher page rank. However, I think you could’ve gone about this better by contacting artistic readers directly instead of putting out a casting call. Your intent is honorable, but you’ve obviously touched a bit of a sore spot among the designer community; we deal with people who place no value on our work all the time, and although I don’t think you undervalue good art (you have an artist relative, as you’ve mentioned in other posts), this offer smacks sorely of the type of person who does undervalue good art.

That said, I’d be more than happy to submit something to you. I love this blog and am a regular reader/commenter, and I’d be happy to give you some graphics as a contribution to the community you’ve jumpstarted here — not for the exposure, but for the sake of helping the cause of something I believe in. We as creatives may deal with crap offers frequently, but it seems it’s led to oversensitivity in the matter of value of our artwork.

And I’m far from taking it personally. If I were taking it personally, I wouldn’t allow such intense criticism of myself to be out there. I opened up the floodgates and allowed a lot of people to criticize a stand I took – I would think it sad if I did NOT participate in the debate and stand up for the perspective that pro bono work like this can help a business. It can – without it, I would have never been a success.

I would have much rather had individual one-on-one discussions with artists, but most of them (like the person who made the “jump the shark” comment above) left invalid email addresses or made threatening responses about me using their personal email address. I consider it highly questionable when a person will levy an attack on someone’s beliefs and then be unwilling to engage in follow-up discussion about it – it’s very unprofessional when you’re doing it in a way that represents your profession.

Mukesh: Page Rank is based, at least in part, on the number of inbound links. Higher value sites (with higher page rank) confer more value on the pages they link to. So, yes, links from popular sites have significant value.

All artists: I don’t want the art, thus I don’t see why I should pay for it. If I wanted the art, I would agree with you that I am going about this wrong.

I knew I had artists as readers and I thought it would be kind to give them free exposure, but I didn’t want a flood of spam – I don’t want 5,000 artists demanding a link for nothing – so I tried to come up with a simple threshold for giving my artist-readers exposure.

The rest of this entire argument is nothing more than artists grinding their axes about the state of their industry and insulting me in the process by demeaning me personally as well as the value of my site, for no good reason as far as I can tell.

So my point is, if it is that easy as you make it out to be in your comments, then Google search results will be flawed (if people search for artist and your personal finance blog shows up because you have links to artists’ websites… then that is a major problem,obviously). They don’t have PHD’s writing Google search engine algorithms just for nothing.

So what your selling to these artists (by the way, I’m not an artist…I’m a web architect by profession) isn’t really “what your selling”. Also even if Google search DID work that way… you are selling (or providing favor as you say it) Google exposures via your website then that business model doesn’t make sense. They can submit their site to Google directly without any effort of creating and sending graphics to Google that they may use on their site.

I think it is the unwillingness to accept the others position that you knew nothing about and move on that has really gotten so many designers upset.

My opinion of The Simple Dollar has dropped significantly. Doubt I’ll be back.

There are probably people who will find this offer valuable, and thus take Trent up on his deal. Even if Trent was doing this to get free graphics, although he has already stated that he wasn’t, it wouldn’t be wrong to ask. If he asks and someone responds to his offer, the market has attributed the value of exposure to be equal to the artist’s time and effort put into creating the pieces. If no one responds, no harm, no foul. Just because Trent at this time is not in the market to purchase artistic services for money does not mean he does not value an artist’s work.

Trent’s offer is exactly the same as an unpaid internship, which are very common. No one complains that the intern in this case is unappreciated or devalued through the process – it is merely an opportunity for the individual to show to his/her future employer that he/she has the experience it is looking for.

If you are an artist, it is unreasonable to tout how you’ve been insulted – just don’t respond to his offer, and find someone who will pay for your work. The market will decide how much an individual’s work is worth. There are plenty of those out there who will pay for your work, as I have myself in the past.

Ok, I am done with “trolling” now. I have enjoyed your site immensely in the past, tried to participate in this conversation by discussing how spec work is seen as a problem with the industry, but have no desire to come back here anymore.