If you are a big brand name company, would you engage a lawyer for his services and say: “we want to engage your services but we will give you *exposure* for working with us, in place of payment”.
Similarly, would you hire a technician, an accountant, a developer or whoever and offer them *exposure* instead of paying for their services?
Can *exposure* buy you bread if you’re hungry? Can *exposure* pay for your living expenses?
But apparantly, Google, the company that made $1.42 billion in the first quarter of 2009 alone, had asked top illustrators to contribute artworks for free. Instead, Google offered *exposure* in return. Read the article.
I wonder where did the search giant get this grossly silly idea from. It’s not like they can’t afford to pay. So much for their ‘Don’t be evil’ motto. Also, is this why Google sites and products have either ugly designs or no visual design?
Ofcourse nobody is forcing anybody to work for free here. If they don’t want to, just say ‘no’, right? But the fact that a highly profitable company would even ask such a thing is so incredibly insulting to any designers & illustrators who do designs for a living. Especially so for top creative professionals, who most probably won’t even need the exposure anyway.
The most unfortunate thing is that such incidence is not uncommon and there are designers who buy the whole idea of *exposure* and would naively slave on COMMERCIAL design projects for free. If you are a professional designer or an illustrator and you’re reading this, please have some respect for yourself, your valuable time, your skills, your talent and the design & visual art field in general. If you don’t value your work, no one will.
