I’ve been out on my own for a few years, but mostly as a sub-contractor of sorts - so I haven’t really had a need for a company logo or things like that. This is now changing as I’m pivoting a bit and going forward I’ve partnered up and now we need to at least get a logo and some stuff up and running.
Our company has been up and running a while, so the name is set.
Does anyone have any experience in getting a third-party to help out with this? If so, got some tips on good places to get this kind of help, what to think about when it comes to instructions or things to think about?
Things to think about:
If it’s in color make sure you use something standard, like Pantone so it can be printed easily.
Make a version that scales well to all sizes (think large signs and letterhead)
Make it so that there is a clean Black and White version for non-color uses.
Consider whether the logo will be trademarked in the future and run a quick chheck to see that it can be.
If you hire an artist be sure you have a signed Work for Hire agreement and that you retain all rights to the image created.
That said our trademark for Black Welsh fails in the greyscale in the rams horn that doesn’t reproduce well in black and white. Our Desert Weyr dragon logo is good in black and white but color was added later and is a motley dragon scale thing that is hard to reproduce.
If you want an attractive, professional looking logo that you don’t mind looking vaguely familiar there are numerous Mac and iOS logo-creation, template-based apps that you can use by yourself.
For a personalized logo maybe the biggest online market to hire designers is Fiverr. You say what your company does, what you’re looking for, and what you want to pay, and dozens of small-pic options will come from designers all over the world. You can pick a logo and work with that designer to tweak it, and when you accept it you’ll pay and in return get whatever high-quality files were agreed to. Just beware that a large minority of these logos will be used with template apps themselves, and many logos have been found to have been blatant copies of work done elsewhere in the world.
(I remember several years ago reading about someone crowing over the gorgeous logo they’d bought which used an oversized letter from the Periodic Table of Elements as a design, only to immediately discover from commenters that it was a shameless ripoff of Adobe’s then-new rebranding of all its software products.)
Since it seems you’ve all gotten some remote third-party to help out with this - what kind of typical pricing would we be talking? I realize it’s difficult, but are we typically talking a handful hundred dollars for good work or thousands?
I’ve never designed a logo but have incorporated those of employers into my work over the years. I just want to say make sure whatever you get is in a vector format and not a bitmap so it can be scaled and still be crisp. I haven’t always been that lucky so have had to manually redraw a few, and of course then they aren’t exactly correct.
Over on Fiverr.com, where you’ll find lots of independent designers around the world (some doing gigs after work, some doing this as their main gig - usually in a poorer country), you’ll see logo design services starting (with limited file and file-size options) at $20. Prices go up to the mid-hundreds (or more) for a unique, custom design from a pro, with input from you and multiple changes.
Dragon logo was about $100 over 20 years ago. Black Welsh trademark cost us $150 again about 20 years ago. But a company I was just involved with got a really nice logo done for about $150 that is excellent and perfect for them.
I have used along with many of my colleagues 99Designs to do logos they have several pricing models all below 1,000 USD expect to pay a couple of hundred dollars
We ended up using Fiverr and got our final logo last week!
Very happy so far. I’m sure we’re going to need a refresh or expansion to get more branding stuff at some point - but the basics is now in place and I avoided spending too much of my time sorting it out!
…now if there was only somewhere to outsource writing content for our simple webpage.
I see a lot of people suggesting Fiverr and I understand why but there are also a lot of really valid reasons not to use fiver. As someone who works in the graphic design space fiverr can really undercut the work that it takes to produce quality designs.
While there are a lot of great designers working on fiverr there are also a lot of scammers or people who make money by selling copyrighted designs. If you’re considering using Fiverr I would encourage you to look into other options.
Working with a local designer can be a good idea if you think there are additional design or marketing services that you are going to need as it allows a continued relationship with someone who will get a better sense of what you are looking for overtime.
Just want to note that I agree about working with the same designer over time - especially if there will be things popping up frequently.
In my case we’re not really going to be doing much marketing or adds. And if we end up in a situation where that becomes a thing, we’d likely find a partner to work with for that process.
We just needed a logo and our company name in some form of design - and that worked wonderfully. Just finding a local designer would probably have taken us more work than the whole process.
It could be that we would have gotten a much better company profile and logo - but that’s a trade-off we’re ok with that this point.
Well, yes. But our website is going to be really light on text for now. But in phase 2 when we want to expand on it and add more content we might go down a path like that.
I completely understand your rational! I just have personal gripes with Fiverr as a company but I certainly didn’t intend to criticize your choices.
If you only need the one quick design I can understand why outsourcing would be your best bet, and really the important thing is that you are happy with the result.
Just finding a local designer would probably have taken us more work than the whole process.