blog.

One of the current debates in our industry is the practice of producing speculative designs to support proposals and pitches - often a tender will include a requirement for a creative or two from our design team to illustrate how we would envisage the 'look and feel' of a new web site.

In April influential blogger Paul Boag announced he was stopping this practice, and the arguments he presents feel quite valid. The design of a site is a consultative process - with users, the client and our designers - and that consultancy is missing if we've got to "whip a few designs together" based on what's written in a tender. It's also something that has stung us in the past - a number of years ago we supplied some creatives to support a pitch that one of our competitors won, only to find that the web site produced was pretty much an exact copy of our work! (which resulted in a swift change to our terms and conditions.....)

Another factor, in a small agency such as ours, are the costs and resources required to produce this work - all on a speculative basis, and I think this is something that gets overlooked by those issuing the tender. We were recently asked by an unnamed local authority to supply three separate and original creatives as part of an open tender which had a value of just under £7k - that's just not cost effective for an agency like us. With heavy heart we turned the opportunity to pitch down, but it made business sense to do so.

I think the best point that Paul Boag makes is that it may be more useful for those issuing the tender to look at an agency's existing portfolio and to talk to their clients. We're lucky - everytime I ask a client to act as a reference for our work I get a really enthusiastic response, which is testament to the the team at Focus. 

So what's our decision? We're going to sit on the fence slightly and take each project on a case by case basis. But it might be worth  noting that this is a hot topic amongst agencies and that some clients might come across those who have decided to act a little more forcibly than we have.