This is the third time I’ve seen a request for proposal like this in 2 months – I’ve now seen red, since this was from a “multinational firm”, I felt the need to blog it. How on earth is providing 3 different sample designs, simply for the purposes of pitching for the work, fair? Then the “client” who has paid nothing for this process, being able to retain the copyright of anything you do for them? Wow. Where do I sign? At what point in that board meeting did someone think this was the correct way to do business? All it shows me is how little value your business puts on design, and the work involved in it.
Simply producing three homepage designs, without any background into your company or the problems your website is currently facing, is just making a pretty, but useless, picture, with no thought into solving real issues. What are you even judging the designs on?
Friends of the web, please bite back at companies who send RFP like this, don’t ignore them – write back, educate them and say how ridiculous their “offer” is (politely of course, we’re not assholes), and for goodness sake don’t even think about completing a thing for them, no matter how much you need the work.
Resources:
No Spec
AIGA on Spec Work