by Danielle Morrill

We Owe Designers An Apology

We’ve learned that many designers view this kind of contest is a form of spec work (thanks to the thoughtful people who educated us, rather than those who were just rude) and there is a movement of people around the idea of #nospec — we now understand this is a big problem in the design world, and especially freelancers who do not get paid for their work.

I hope it is obvious that was not our intention, but unfortunately we didn’t think it through beyond “this might be fun for some of our readers”. We’re sorry.

As you can probably imagine, the team here at Mattermark values design. It is exactly my laziness and lack of design that lead to needing to replace our logo in the first place… and I’d thought it would be fun to invite the Internet to weigh in on what we should do now that we’ve been asking to change our logo. We had hoped to have some fun with our community, see some silly tweets and maybe even cook up some real ideas for the new logo. We have a full-time designer on staff who is working on this project (yes we pay him!).

We’re not jerks and we’re not trying to set back designers. Even though we still need to learn more about this problem, we’re ending this contest because it marginalizes people we care about. Designers we know and respect tweeted to us telling us this contest is a bad idea.

Thank you for all the feedback, and we’re sorry.