As a communications professional, I would recommend that you do a bit of background research first next time, and word your offer in a clearer manner. I’m sure that if you had quantified the value of the link upfront, like any good ad rep does (trust me, I’ve done media placement), the response would have been different.

Trent, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by narrowing the offer a bit – being more specific about what you want and explaining that your restrictions are aimed at avoiding spam, for one. Also quantifying the value of the links would have helped. Or asking for 1 or 2 sample pieces, so that the person gets chosen before losing too much time upfront.

I am a professional designer (art director in fact), and let me tell you, our profession gets demeaned daily. Graphic artists, designers, illustrators and visual artists also tend to all get shoved in the same basket while there are very real differences between the various graphic professions. It does get irritating after a while to have to routinely get referred

Multiple people essentially said that their feelings were hurt, and each time Trent essentially responded with (the false logic error) that “because I did not mean to offend anyone, they have no right to be offended. Case closed.”

Elaine’s tailor analogy seemed perfect. No matter that Trent was trying to do people a favor and that the artists weren’t required to participate.

I found this website about 2 hours ago, and my joy turned to a deep disappointment after reading the comments of this section.

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.