How to create a perfect logo design avoiding bankruptcy

Did you know that Google paid $0 for its Logo? (Sergey Brin itself made it) Did you know that Twitter paid $15 for its logo? And that Nike paid only $35?

Surprising, right? To design a perfect logo for your brand or project, you don’t need to spend too much money.

Logos are important, they allow to identify products and companies. They are designed to create immediate recognition by the viewer. The uniqueness of your logo is necessary to avoid confusion of your targeted customers among your competitors.

You will have to spend time to create yours. Even, if you delegate the creation process, it will cost you energy to iterate and gave enough feedback to designers making it for you. To decide how much money and time you want to spend on it, it will really depends on your project’s ambition and what you need.

Here are basic, general tips to use when designing your logo.

  • Choose your colors carefully

  • Try illustrating your business’s key benefits

  • Make it clean and functional

  • Focus on your identity

  • Look at the logos of competitors (to not copy them)

  • Make it simple (Apple, nike, twitter have all really simple logos..)

In this post, you will find a detailed comparison of the 3 most known methods to get a logo. Two of them are based on online resources and tools.

  1. Do it yourself with online maker tools. (Almost Free)

  2. Crowdsource your logo online. (Cheap and efficient - My recommendation)

  3. Choose an agency firm. (Expensive but complete freedom of expression)

1°) Online makers

The first option that you will find tempting on the internet are online WYSIWYG makers.

Those tools will let you create your own logo by yourself without technical knowledge. This is the cheapest solution but be aware that you won’t get a unique logo design. Each one of those makers provides basic templates, you will have to choose among those templates and customize a little bit the result choosing colors, fonts and texts.

This means that somewhere around the world, companies may have the same logo than you.

As I said, designing a logo will really depend on your project ambition and what you need. Being unique is not always a consideration. If you want to quickly get a logo to present a concept or an idea, this is for sure the fastest solution (30min max).

Moreover, you won’t get (as output) a vectorial format file, you will most of the time only get low resolution PNG or JPEG file. This means it will be impossible for you to print them on large support like roller banners, etc.

Please, find below some of those tools

2°) Design marketplace - Freelancers (My recommendation)

Those companies provide logos by crowdsourcing designs with freelancers. Customers solicit designers to submit designs for contests to create products such as websites, flyers, logos, etc.. The customer then chooses the best design from the pool of submitted entries and the selected designer will win a cash payment.

Using those services, you control and validate your price prior starting the contest which is perfect (No bad surprises).

I used 99designs twice and I really enjoyed it. Each time, I received hundreds of designer proposals, I applied rating to each proposal and gave feedbacks to the best designers letting them improve their draft. At the end, I had unique logos for 239 Euros.

http://en.99designs.fr/logo-design/contests/create-disruptive-logo-eenox-189237

The only cons is that if you want the best logos, you need to be present, push designers into their limits. Answering their questions and giving them the most feedbacks as possible about your brands wishes and objectives, etc. This process takes minimum 2-3 hours a day during 2-3 weeks.

3°) Professional design firms

The last well-known alternative to get a logo is to hire a professional design firm.

The main pros are that you can work with a real local team and not an online freelancer that you will, for sure, never saw. You will also benefit an endless freedom of expression and commitment from professionals. The main cons are the high costs of working with a professional design firm. They will charge anywhere from $4,000 to $15,000 for a logo design. By the way, Pepsi paid $1.000.000 for their logos. The BBC paid $1.800.000 for their last version. The more you pay, the more quality and autonomy you will have from the firm.

Even if it seems expensive, design firms may be a great option if you consider making all your branding in the same place with the same team (website, logos, pitch, flyers, brochures, roller banners, videos etc.). Some agencies provides packages for startup for example. That’s what I used for my company jooxter.com last year, it was not free but we didn’t regret it. We now have standardized branding for all our support and we can focus entirely on our communication strategy.

Conclusion

We live in a society painted with logos, we just have to walk into a city to see instantly hundreds of logos trying to grab our attention and forcing us to buy what they tempt to represent.

A great logo is more than just words, a logo will be your customer’s first impression.

A great logo must tell a story about your company. Who you are and what you do. It might seems easy to do but it is not, which is why it’s important that you take the time to do it right. Every detail count.

PS : Once you’ve produced your logo, make sure you trademark it to protect it from use by other companies.




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