Wedding Wednesday: Minted Design Competition Entries

Minted’s Design Competitions

Minted sells highly curated designs made by independent artists and designers. As far as I know, all of their designs come from their frequent design competitions in which designers submit their work, participate in a critique phase, and vote on the winners.

My philosophy on spec work

Before moving on, I want to share my views on spec work. If you’re a long-time reader or former student, you probably know what I’m going to say! Speculative work, or spec work for short, is any unpaid work created for the potential of being selected or recognized and most likely will result in non-payment for services rendered. Design contests are often posed as such to obtain design work for free. I strongly advise my students not to participate in these because they can hurt the profession by profliferating the idea that designers will work for recognition or “portfolio building”.

Although this is my general belief, I recently decided to enter my work in a Minted’s design competitions because I saw additional value beyond the potential for my work being chosen to sell on their site.

Why I decided to participate in Minted’s design challenges

I want to become more involved with the design community.

I like the idea of being active in Minted’s design community because the other artists are similar to me—a blend between designer/artist. Minted is online and easy to participate, which is ideal since I loathe networking events (hi, I’m an introvert).

I miss actively participating in critique with designers who are at or above my level.

This is the main reason I decided to participate in Minted’s design challenges. I critique students and entry-level designers on a daily basis, but I don’t receive much relevent critique from other designers at or above my level. Minted allows the option to request feedback on your work during the submission phase of a competition, so even though my work is unpaid, I’m getting something tangible from the competitions.

I already have wedding invite designs ready to submit.

I didn’t create any new work, and in the future, I’m not planning to create unpaid work specifically for Minted’s competitions because I still firmly believe making work for the hopes of being chosen for a contest is a waste of my time. I may design something for fun that I can use for a competition and use elsewhere if it’s not chosen, but likely I’ll not participate if I don’t have something ready to go or get that “creative spark” from a brief.

(Being chosen would be rad.)

Being selected for a slot on Minted would give me additional credibility as an invitation designer and artist. I could even get the opportunity to sell more work on the site. (Which means I could ditch my Etsy site, and you all know I would like to do that!) This is obviously not my sole reason for participating, but it’s still something in the back of my mind when I hit “submit”.

My Minted Design Challenge Submissions

Foil-Pressed Design Challenge

Currently Minted is taking submissions for a foil-pressed wedding invite design challenge. (For those not familiar, foil is the metallic stuff on paper goods.) I updated some of my designs to include a foiled element and submitted those to the current challenge.

Non-Foil Pressed Design Challenge

I submitted a bunch of my designs a few weeks ago to Minted’s non-foil pressed wedding invite design challenge. This challenge is currently in the voting phase. If you have a chance, vote for my submissions in the current challenge by January 31. Click on any (or all!) of the designs below to vote. (You’ll have to sign up for an account, but otherwise it’s pretty painless to participate.)

What next?

If I don’t win a spot in the challenge (it’s VERY unlikely that I win), I’m planning to release these foil-pressed designs on my website once I figure out the best way to produce them for the masses. I’m also reworking my Etsy store to include printing, but both of these things are on my backburner since I have a lot going on (I’m working 3.5ish jobs right now depending on how you count). Don’t expect to see these ready for sale until 2020. Until then, if you see this post and are interested in one of these designs, contact me and we can work on getting something produced for you.

If you’re a designer (or other creative profession), how do you feel about spec work?

OR

How do you participate in your professional community?