Free Pitching Vs. Work Experience

16th February, 2012 by Sarah Stephenson

When you think of volunteer & work experience in graphic design is it any different to free pitching. AGDA explains that free pitching is a bad idea for many different reasons. But I’m not convinced?

Free Pitching goes on and on about not receiving any pay, deadline or anything. But that's not the real truth of it.

This depends on the clients. If it’s work experience or a volunteer environment. They might supply you with materials and tools. At the moment a printing place is helping my client and is giving him a good deal on prints. So my only job here is to design & hand in the designs to the printing place & than they hand it over to my client. No strings attached to me.

This might count as Free Pitching. People lay it down as difficult because they choose the wrong clients and environment. To collected Right clients visit charities, locals schools & churches. They might be collecting volunteers and they might need interesting talents and skills. I applied and in the end got good results.

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Hi Sarah,

Free pitching is the practice of clients or would-be clients asking for unpaid design submissions or speculative presentations from one or more designers/studios in order to decide the ‘winner' of the work to be commissioned or used.

Some designers do choose to provide design work or services for free on a pro bono basis. However pro bono work is different from pitching in that pro bono work should not be provided as part of a competitive process designed to win new business or extra publicity, nor on products or projects ultimately intended for commercial gain.

Designers providing any pro bono work do so entirely at their own discretion, usually for moral, ethical or philosophical reasons, and usually for non-commercial, not-for-profit organisations or deserving individuals. If competitive or commercial factors are present, then it’s not pro bono.

Posted by Anthony Gagliardi on 22nd February 2012

But with both they offer more experience, if not paid work. The Graphic Design Industry only makes these excuses. Unpaid work is unpaid work!


Posted by Sarah Stephenson on 22nd February 2012