A quite interesting debate topic from Creative Review. Written by Patrick Burgoyne:
On Saturday I chaired a Q&A session with Stefan Sagmeister at the Cheltenham Design Festival. During our discussion, he revealed that his studio never pitches for work. ‘That’s all very well for a big name like Stefan Sagmeister’, you might think, ‘what about the rest of us?’ But Sagmeister revealed that refusing to pitch for work is becoming more and more common in the US. And there are sound reasons for doing so.
Sagmeister’s argument, and one that is shared by many, is that the pitch process is bad for designers, clients and the work. The work that usually ends up winning, he says, is not necessarily the best solution for the client but the best response to the brief in the pitch. Such briefs typically ask work to respond to a list of criteria: an identity must be ‘dynamic’, say, or reference ‘diversity’. So the respondents engage in a box-ticking exercise to address these criteria and the winner is the one that does it best.
Read the whole article here.
