An article in today’s online Wall Street Journal highlights the pros and cons of using a logo design service to brand your small business. The four design services they used came up with four acceptable but generic logo designs that could work on a letterhead or invoice. All were priced under $150.
$150 seems like quite a deal, especially when professional design services can take weeks or months and cost in the hundreds of thousands. So what makes logo design normally so expensive? Well to start out with, time. Market research can take weeks, before even the first round of logo designs. Then the first round normally consists of dozens of sketches. 8-10 of those initial concepts with be fleshed out in a rough form for delivery to the client. The client can be just one person, but more often it’s many people from different departments, maybe from different offices around the world. Each person will have their own ideas about what the logo should look like.
Subsequent rounds will involve tweaking initial concepts, creating new concepts, trying different color variations, trying variations of those variations, trying different arrangements of the logo’s elements, comping logo concepts on vehicles and buildings, building an identity system based on the logo, deciding how the logo will work on advertising and corporate communications, deciding how the logo will affect corporate culture, creating a roll-out strategy, putting together a brand guidelines for distribution to other designers, etc etc etc.
So as a small businessperson, don’t expect the work to be done after you’ve paid $150 for a piece of artwork with you business name on it. The work has only just begun, and your designer is not even there to help you use your new logo. If you’re in it for the long-term, consider using someone who knows what your business goals are, and who’s going to be available to help you down the road.
Wall Street Journal article.
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