Graphics - What should I be paying

Jonny303

Hi,

Its come time to give my business a little bit of a lift cosmetically. Nothing drastic just new price lists, update website etc.

How (long is a piece of string) much should you look at paying for someone to do out a new logo for you?

Thanks

jimmii

It really is a piece of string unfortunately! You can get someone to knock you one together for a fiver or you can Damien Hirst to do one for a few hundred grand! A decent designer would probably charge a few hundred for a logo, letter head and business card. If you want an experienced designer to do it properly it's a day or two work.

davidom2513

Can get one done on fiverr.com for.... yep you guessed it, a fiver!

Also try freelancer.com and upwork.com

Also i would never pay a few hundred euro for a Logo. If you have an idea in your head of what you want, basic photoshop skills can complete it

Keep in mind that the best logos are very simplistic.

But if you've got money to burn spend whatever you feel comfortable with

Axwell

davidom2513 wrote: »

Also i would never pay a few hundred euro for a Logo. If you have an idea in your head of what you want, basic photoshop skills can complete it

A logo should be done in Vector format so that it can be scaled to be used on anything from a sticker to a billboard - if you use photoshop with basic skills th eresult is going to be a raster image that can only be scaled downwards and keep any resolution.

That's just one of the many reasons why you should pay someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to your brand.

Cianos

davidom2513 wrote: »

Can get one done on fiverr.com for.... yep you guessed it, a fiver!

Also try freelancer.com and upwork.com

Also i would never pay a few hundred euro for a Logo. If you have an idea in your head of what you want, basic photoshop skills can complete it

Keep in mind that the best logos are very simplistic.

But if you've got money to burn spend whatever you feel comfortable with

You'd be surprised by the amount of time and effort that can go into making those best logos look simplistic - simple/memorable isn't something that just happens, it can take a lot of work and revisions to finally arrive at that elegant/simple solution.

Take a look at this page that shows the amount of work that went into one of Instagram's slight identity revisions.

Your logo is the visual summary of your business and will affect every design aspect throughout. It's really not something that should be done with minimising costs as being the primary objective.

jimmii

Your logo is likely to be one of the first things people see of your brand. You also want consistency of branding across various formats and stationery etc a designer will not only do that they will do branding guidelines so that you have a consistent image where ever you want to use it. You're likely investing a good bit of time and money in your business don't let it down with poor branding.

antoinolachtnai

You can spend two million on graphics and brand and get great value.

You can spend 150 euro down in *insert name of local print company here* and be robbed.

Here is a rule of thumb:

Keep your spend in proportion.

If you are spending fifty thousand euros per year distributing leaflets or advertising or other promotional stuff, I would say you should be spending between five thousand and twenty-five thousand on design. As you go up the price range I would expect the design proportion to fall (somewhere like DAA would spend maybe tens of millions on comms of various sorts per year, but the design fee is only going to be in the hundreds of thousands.)

Now it depends on what you are doing too. If you are some sort of lifestyle led offer, perhaps for something like furnishings or beauty, then you need to spend a lot more than if you are just Ned's Cheap Tyre Change.

I would also say that if you are in the 'serious' end of b2b, dealing with medium-sized or large clients, I would invest something in the brand. It is just one of those things you need these days as a hygiene factor. It's strange, but it's important.

At this stage of the game, I would really not be doing this stuff myself. For one thing, it is very time consuming and not easy to get an acceptable result. For another, there are a lot of cheap online options.

People will complain that these cheap options will give you plain, derivative, low quality design work. All these criticisms are absolutely correct and I would use these options with caution if the design and styling is of anything more than peripheral importance. It is still better than doing it yourself though.

Think about whatever business you are in. It doesn't matter if you're a hairdresser or a doctor or a security firm. Think, can anyone do it instead of hiring you? Can they get it done cheaper somewhere else, especially overseas? Probably they can. Think about the reasons that this would (or would not) not be a good idea for your customers. Well, you will benefit if you think about design the same way. Do you do it yourself, do you get a really basic operator to help you, or do you get something top-class? There's no right answer, you have to decide for yourself.

Dades

As an experiment, when I was looking for logo design for my business, I tried a few different designers on Fiverr. You get what you pay for!

A couple of them didn't even read the 'brief' and gave me something other than what I asked for.

In the end I created one myself (I have 15+ years of photoshop exp) but I'd love to have had the money to get one designed properly as I understand the limitations of a non-professional.

Reedsie

99designs is fantastic value for money if you want to get a lot of ideas and are prepared to put a bit of time in yourself (finding designers, contacting designers, working with designers). Reading something like Logo Design Love (or better still a few logo design books) first might pay off too.