On one of the forums recently someone objected to my using the term “crappy” when referring to work one might get from a self-made, none-too-well-designed photographer’s website. The poster seemed to get his knickers in a twist over the idea that I would judge anyone’s work in any way, much less to judge it crappy.
Well, I’m here to tell you that there is plenty of crappy work out there and we need to stop being afraid of calling it crap. But the poster completely missed my point–in this case I wasn’t calling the work produced crappy, I was calling the work offered crappy.
Creatives need to stop agreeing to do crappy work–the crappy work that is offered by cheap clients who barely want “good enough” creative work and don’t want to pay anything close to a fair price for it. You know crap when you see it–when a client comes to you with a stock image and wants you to reproduce it because they don’t want to pay the “high” (cough!) stock usage price; or the one who wants the logo by tomorrow and wants it to look just like their competitor’s, but better and for $250; or the one who wants the ad to show “free” at least 3 times, with a starburst, and make the logo bigger, and make sure you can see that the people in the image are black, white, Asian, gay, straight, male, and female, but keep it to two people to save money–oh, and the insert date is tomorrow but there is no reason to have a rush charge since “all you have to do is find the right stock image and change the font a teeny bit.”
All of these clients, and so many others, are offering crappy work and it is up to the creative to say “no” to it. In saying “no” you are liberating yourself. You free your mind from the burden of doing work that depresses you. You don’t have to “sell out” but instead can hold your head high and say “I am not the right person for this project” and look yourself in the mirror without wincing.
The added bonus is that some of these crappy clients will learn from your refusal; they will go back to their bosses and say “we can do better–the creative I wanted to do this project can do much more with this, if we let him/her.” This will take time, and it won’t happen with all the crappy clients out there, but the contacts who want to work with you and who are impressed with your honesty and integrity will, when given the opportunity, come back to you with the not-crappy work.
The crap-seekers will just find some other “desperate” creative to do their bidding.
So go after the best clients out there and take passes on the crappy work. Seek out the work that will fulfill you creatively as well as financially. Feed your soul as well as your accounts receivable. Don’t forget, they won’t know you are out there unless you market to them–the good clients. There are loads of them out there. Plenty to go around! Find them, work with them, and keep your heads up.
Leslie-
Awesome post. I love it. If people stood up for themselves more and more, the crappy clients would eventually be eliminated from the gene pool.
I met a photographer a few weeks ago who produces crappy work for crappy clients. He is stuck in a rut to saying yes and lives a creatively miserable life because of it. I asked what he really loved to do and he pulled out a stack of prints that were amazing. I smiled, laughed and almost cried.
We need to pull together to help put an end to crappy non-creative work.
Thanks Leslie!
Coffee is a commodity, just ask Starbucks! There will always be a market for those that don’t know the difference between a good and bad image, price is king and any picture that consumer didn’t take is a good picture. Hopefully, that is not the market for a creative professional photographer.
Recently, I was asked to donate the use of my lighting equipment for a local fund raiser.. I suggested they contact local portrait photographer to see if they could put together a package. They ended up finding local folks to contribute backgrounds and lighting for free and found a local amateur to take the images. They charged prices for packages that were barely above the cost of processing. I am sure they think things were a great success, the non-profit made some money. Can’t say how the photos turned out, haven’t seen them. It could have been a win-win situation.. but I suspect that at least a few of the folks were disappointed with the work.. and certainly the local portrait photographers were just shaking their heads.
Well said. 4 words to live by:
“‘Good enough’ never is.”