The Myth of the $50 Logo
Recently, I got a call-out-of-the-blue from a fellow who wanted logo designed for his company. “Great,”I think. “This is what I do.” Then I listened to the man go on at length about how in his buisness, logos didn’t need to be unique, or have character. They can just be generic because nobody cares, he said.
Next, he explained how he had already tried the cut-rate, on-line buy-a-logo services in the past and had not been happy. I hoped he would say he had not been happy with the logo quality, but in fact, he had not been happy with the price. Since most on-line logo outfits offer logo design for $100, I was afraid to know, but had to ask. How much did he want to spend?
About $50.
At this point, most professional designers would bust out laughing and hang up. And rightly so. As a friend and colleague put it, you can’t even get a good haircut for $50. Freelance designers, depending on skill level, can charge from $35 an hour to well over $100 an hour–being self-employed, we have to charge enough to cover our own taxes, health care and any other benefits the average person gets.
But being the crazy person I am, I did what I thought was a passable job of hiding my snort of derision and resisted the urge hang up. I could understand how a non-designer would look at a text-based logo and assume that it would take mere minutes to assemble. I wondered exactly how long it would take to design such a logo for a client who seemed to know exactly what he wanted. And I was having a slow summer already. A little goodwill project for a fellow small business owner might not be a bad thing.
I explained that I normally charged much more for my services, but because I could understand where he was coming from, I said I would do the design for his price, but only under certain conditions. First, we would sit down together with a sketch pad. I would sketch several logo concepts with his input, and he would select one he liked on the spot. I would then execute the logo, emailing him the final results including b/w and reversed out variations. And we’d be done.
He agreed. The experiment was on.
Step One: Meeting
I met with the client and we went over some logos in my portfolio. I explained a bit about the characteristics that made a good logo (vector format, scalability, ability to appear in reverse) and talked about the “character” of fonts—oldstyle for tradition and stablity vs. modern/sans-serif for contemporary, sleek look, and Times New Roman for the “I was too lazy to change my default font” look. Using my Pantone swatchbook, the client was also able to show me the exact shade of green he preferred.
I sketched 10 concepts. The client narrowed the selection down to four– a few more than the one concept I planned for.
Time spent: 1 hour
Step Two: Executing the Logo Concepts
First step, launch Adobe Illustrator and type the company name. Next, spend the next twenty minutes trying out fonts. This is harder than it sounds, considering that graphic designers own about 5 times as many fonts than the average Joe. Me, I have 640+ fonts currently on my Mac. Of course I don’t try EVERY font out for the logo, but it still takes time to just to try out a selection of only the modern or oldstyle fonts in my collection.
Of course, designers know that most fonts aren’t acceptable as typed. So I spent another five to ten minutes adjusting the wordmark’s tracking, leading and kerning.
Even though the client said he wanted a plain type-based logo, some of the sketches required re-shaping of letterforms. I made some duplicates of the original typed phrase and spent another 20-30 minutes transforming letterforms into editable shapes and stretching, warping, arching, and creating type-on-paths.
Adding color to the logo options was easy with a ready-selected Pantone color. I added the swatch to my swatches palette and applied the color accordingly. This took about five minutes.
I created seven logo comps in a little over an hour. Finally, I created a PDF of the comps and e-mailed them to the client.
Time spent: 1.5 hours
Step Three: Creating additional designs
Despite the plan to pick one design, execute it and be done, the client e-mailed back that he had some additional concepts he wanted to see. I was not surprised. Clients rarely accept the first draft of ANYTHING.
After sending a carefully worded e-mail reminding the client that in order to keep the price on this project to $50, I needed to limit the additional concepts and edits, I took the sketches he faxed and repeated the process of trying out fonts, adjusting spacing, and manipulating character shapes to match the client’s sketches. I spent another half hour on the new comps.
At the bottom of the faxed sketches was a note about color. “On the green — any chance of getting the color more forest/darker green?” So much for picking a color in advance.
I sent an e-mail explaining how color looks different on screen than it does in print and that the color I used was the color we chose. But, I told him, if he needed a logo for screen/web that matched the color we picked for print, we might have to have two sets of colors. I spent the next 15-20 minutes loading additional color swatches to my set and creating a mini swatch set on the bottom of the document I was about to send. This would allow the client to pick a screen color he liked. I would then use the builds for that color to create a set of logos specifically for screen use.
Time spent: .75 hours
Step Four: Choosing the final design
The client liked the new designs and settled on a color, but couldn’t decide between two of the logo comps. We spent some time in e-mail exchanges and phone calls, discussing the merits of each. I also did some on-line research regarding printing prices for business cards. After a few days thinking it over, the client picked a design and gave me the go-ahead to finalize the files.
Time spent: 20 minutes
Step Five: Executing the logo sets
I took the chosen design and created three sets of logos: a vector set, a high res TIF set and a JPG set. For the vector set, I took the logo and created a two color version, a black and white version, and a reversed out version. Since TIFs and JPGs are not scalable (they pixellate when reduced or expanded in size), I make a set of logos in two color and black and white in three different sizes, for a total of six TIF files and six JPGs. Most clients can’t open vector files and don’t know what to do with them. They can, however work with TIFs and JPGs. To keep pixellation to a minimum when they re-size their logos, I give them three sizes of each.
I type up a set of instructions for using the logos, and include the spot color number and color builds for the green. I package up the logo sets and send them to the client.
Time spent: .5 hours
Step 6: Placing the print order and delivering the final product
Because the client was clearly interested in cost-savings, I chose to order the cards from an on-line printer–50 cards for $5. I prepared a print-resolution PDF, uploaded the file and placed the order. In about a week and a half, the cards arrived. I delivered them to the client the following day.
Time spent: .5 hours
GRAND TOTAL HOURS SPENT: 4.55 hours
Now, four hours on a logo design is relatively small time period. The resulting logo was unremarkable, which is expected with so little time spent. However, because it was professionally designed, the logo was fully functional, unlike logos “designed” by people with two minutes of Photoshop experience.
Did I lose my shirt on this project? Had I charged my going rate of $75 an hour, I would have earned $341.25, so yes, I’d say so. The experience was, however, a confirmation that even a “simple text only logo” takes more than an hour to put together.
A logo is a key component of any business, and has the potential to stay with a business and represent that business for many years. While starting a business is an expensive proposition, logo design is not the place to cut corners. Considering that most folks will invest thousands on computers that last less than a decade, and thousands more on cell phones and other services, a few hundred dollars for a professionally designed logo is a small price to pay.