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What Is a Logo?
To understand what a logo is meant to do, we first must know what a logo is. A logo’s design is for immediate recognition, inspiring trust, admiration, loyalty and an implied superiority. The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic entity, and its shapes, colours, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organisations and other non-commercial entities. “Simply put a logo is a companies unique visual identifier, its the face of your brand and how its recognised.”
It makes me wonder why people have no logo or why they would even bother with a cheap logo design if a logo is meant to do all of these things?
Logo Design Contests
The worst deal you could probably go for is a logo design contest. Logo design contests are where you give a brief and then you have multiple designers come back to you with their design ideas. Although this sounds like a mighty good deal, the quality is usually far from anything you would want to represent your business.
You will be wasting your money and in the long term, in terms of damage done to your business, that amount could be quite considerable.
On another note, design contests & designers who design on a speculative basis are damaging the design industry as designers should not have to invest time and resources with no guarantee of payment.
If you want further proof, and would like to read more then i recommend you read these articles by David Airey:
Logo Design Contests Are Bad For Business or The Reality of Logo Design Contests.
The To Good To Be True Deals
These deals are extremely deceiving and the quality is far from satisfactory. Have you ever wondered how much thought they actually put into your logo design? Professional logo designers have a strict logo design process that can take weeks or in some cases months to complete a logo. They may offer you a result within 24 hours or maybe even less meaning literally no thought was put into your logo design. If your a designer you may find this our article of ours useful: Improve The Flow of Your Logo Design Process
Stock Imagery
Some so called “designers” (usually the same people who enter design contests) steal images from stock sites to design your logo… or in some cases business owners download and use the stock images themselves. This is a huge no-no. Did you know that stock imagery gets downloaded by thousands of people? This should be reason enough not to use stock imagery as your logo.
If you do this, other people will have access to your logo design and can and will use it in places that will potentially devalue your business. Ensure your logo design is original.
Do It Your Self Logo Design
Closely linked to the stock imagery scenario above, business owners or those wanting a logo will try to do it themselves. I see it all the time a business will contact me and say something along the lines of
“this logo of ours is now looking outdated, we designed it ourselves a few years back and now we realise the business is not growing the way we hoped and think the logo needs an update as i do appreciate now that it does look terrible”
This says it all they tried to do it the cheap way but years down the line they realise its affected the business, lost them custom and money further delaying the growth of their business. And this is a lesson many business owners have experienced.
So I highly recommend against this and suggest you leave the design to a professional, much as you would leave your car engine to a mechanic.
Free Logo Makers
You get what you pay for! this old saying couldn’t be truer. There are lots even hundreds of free online logo makers / logo generators on the internet. Those logos they produce are purely symbols. They have no life in them, no thought or concept, No time or research, basically no effort whatsoever!. They defiantly will not convey your brands key message and image and they run a very real and very high risk of making your business look unprofessional and damaging its reputation this is something that is hard to turn around if it happens.
A logo designed by a professional experienced logo designer will be 100% original and tailor-made to your specific requirements and from your brief another important aspect of logo design is the logo brief, this is something that’s no-existent with free logo makers.
Logo makers, logo generators and DIY logo tools have a limited number of fonts and image combinations. Most logo makers also use stock imagery. Stock imagery is available all over the internet and used by thousands of people worldwide across the globe.
You could quite easily end up creating something very similar to another company without realising it. …In fact i guarantee it! As professional logo designers without realising can design a concept that may be very similar to another logo design, because in most cases its already been done before it may not be intentional but its just how the mind works when concept designing, but as a professional when this happens we can take this idea and develop it further, you cant with a free logo maker!
Getting a Logo Design With Out Feedback
Before approving and implementing a logo design, ensure you get feedback from your clients, peers, and partners / shareholders. Getting feedback on a logo design is a crucial part of the logo design process as it ensures that your logo is going to be successful.
Take these poor logo design options above and you may end up with a logo that will look poor but also it may resemble something else. I wonder how long it took them to realised their logos had such hidden meaning? Do yourself a favour and ensure your logo does not turn out like the examples below… Invest and get a quality, professionally designed logo.
What’s The Price Of Professional Logo Design?
The cost of a professional logo design has circled the internet for years and its a question that cannot be answered easily as every client and company has different needs, however, the best way to approach this problem is to draw up a customised quote for each individual.
A number of factors have to be taken into consideration when designing a logo, such as how many logo concepts need to be presented, how many revisions are required, how much research is needed, the size of the business and so on. The more you invest in such an important part of your business’s visual representation the more a designer can invest their time in your business, to help it be visually represented in the correct way, the logo is the first part of the business the customers sees it only takes seconds for the customers to form an opinion of your brand based on how the face of the business is represented.
To close of this article, I’ll quote a comparison by David Airey: Comparing the design industry to any other is by no means exact, but the, “How much for a logo?” question is kind of like asking an estate agent, “How much for a house?”.