This week, I was solicited by a company called Pingg to create designs for their online-invitation service. They are like a much, much prettier version of eVite, who I regularly use for group invitations. Pingg’s schtick is that they use great design for their invitations. And I was certainly flattered that they asked me.

My first question was, “How do you compensate designers?” They don’t. I was told that it’s an opportunity to have my designs in front of 700,000 monthly hits. In all the time that I’ve used eVite (at least three years), I never once looked at the name of the designer of the invitations. They have a “featured designs” section, and I’ve seen their list of partners, but I’ve never linked to their sites. And I don’t really care. I am using their service; if I wanted to know about a designer, I would hire one. Well, I wouldn’t. But someone else would.

Pingg is set up a bit differently. They have a very clean website layout, with a featured designers’ section, and they include bios and links on their site to specific designers. This is all very tempting. But then I started reading some articles about their business model and herein lies the problem. Ok, so the company started with $500,000 of the founders’ own funding and within the next couple of years raised millions more. They have revenue-generating ads on their site. Their CEO gave a talk at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo called “Cashing Out: When, How and How Much.” So I think we can agree the company wants to make money, and that is totally fine.

In art school, most students start out with a healthy hatred of The Man. They don’t want to sacrifice the passion, intention and audience of their work by going commercial and thus being beholden to the vision of a corporation. But there’s a happy medium here, where an artist can show companies a vision, and they do this through brand-building. Every artist and every designer is her own brand, and as you build your brand, companies come to you looking for your creative advice. The sooner you realize this, the better, so you can get started marketing yourself.

The point here is that your brand as a designer is valuable. Your services are a skill that companies don’t necessarily have (or have the time for) and this time/skill costs money. To work for free for a profiting corporation is to devalue the field of design, or illustration, or art. Further, a corporation whose business model requires unpaid designers is unethical. Also inconsistent. Martha Stewart is on Pingg and I’m hard-pressed to believe that she would distribute her brand freely, but maybe I’m wrong.

This is not to say that I don’t do pro-bono or deeply discounted work for non-profits, which give me total creative freedom. (Just look at my portfolio.) Graduate students are often asked to do work for free or virtually free. And this is fine to develop a portfolio, network and experiment. But eventually, you realize that your work is worth something, and to agree to work for nothing is to say that you don’t value your own time or skill. A brand is something we recognize as having value (hopefully) and as such, a brand’s products and services cost money because we believe they are worth something to us. A designer is no different. And Pingg cannot operate without designers.

Last year I met illustrator Brian Stauffer and he told my students not to undersell their work. So, Pingg, I decline the offer and further ask you to consider paying your designers. Your business depends on us.