Buying a logo on the internet

A survival guide

Over the years, the online logo design industry has become a fiercely competitive one, as more and more firms compete for an ever-shrinking bit of the marketplace. That’s generally good for you, the client, as it offers a wider range of choices, and forces designers to constantly strive to improve their pricing, customer service and level of work. Survival of the Fittest kinda deal. And despite the claims of some graphic design purists, it’s now the case that you now, for several hundreds of dollars, can have what used to cost thousands. Ot tens of thousands. To this day, and according to the Graphic Artists Guild (GAG) you should be paying anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 for a corporate logo at a traditional design firm (at least according to their GAG Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. While logo designers love to quote this as a pitch, it should be pointed out that this suggested pricing reflects a brand ‘build’ not a simple logo design treatment. It does, however, give you an idea on the competitive forces at work). It’s all free market and capitalism at its finest.

On the other hand, this heated marketplace has led other firms to develop business practices that are designed only to cut their costs, so that they can feature spurious claims on their web sites. Many of these companies are more interested in logo design & search engines quackery than the design process itself. That’s not to say that you can’t still get an effective logo from folks using these techniques to market themselves. You probably can. And this isn’t a ‘bash the competitors hit piece. Truth to tell, some design ‘purists’ are heavily critical of our business model which tends to fly in the face of GAG as well. It’s just that as a newcomer to the online logo design business, you may not know what’s going on ‘behind the scenes’.

We do.

1) Unlimited Revisions

Unlimited revisions on any logo design project are a myth. Nuff said ’bout that.

2) Project Managers

Sounds all business. One small problem – Project Mangers are to keep you away from your designer, not to help you communicate with them. Your designer probably isn’t in the same building. May even be in a different country.

3) The 100% money back guarantee that isn’t

At lot of logo designers & websites boast a 100% money back guarantee. Trouble is, when you read the fine print, it’s always less a service charge. Here’s the deal. You pay for the company logo design ‘package’. If you don’t like what the firm has produced, you get some of your money back. They keep a small portion, usually to pay for design time that went into the project. That’s called a limited guarantee and is fair enough. Doesn’t look as impressive as ‘Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed” in a star burst, though, so you’re presented with the embellished version. We don’t think clients are naive enough to fall for it, so we don’t bother.

4) Logo design ‘review’ sites

The logo design industry is, by most definitions, a small one. So why would anyone pay to develop a web site, hosting and maintenance of same, to feature a bunch of supposedly unbiased reviews of logo designer web sites. Answer? They wouldn’t. All (and yes, that means all) of the so-called logo review websites can be tracked back to one design firm or another (while they don’t make it easy, we have our ways). How can you tell who’s behind the ‘review’ site? That’s easy. The site or sites that get the highest reviews. There’s a new one around that includes reviews of two sites, owned by the same company, as the very best of the best. Funny enough, The Logo Factory® was also featured as one of the ‘top ten’ companies (thanks very much guys!), but we dropped from a 4.8 (out of five) stars, to a 3.8 (out of five stars) as ‘punishment’ when I wrote a blog piece exposing this fairly shady practice. Bottom line – the only people interested in ‘reviewing’ logo design sites are people who own one. And that, alas, renders the usefulness of any reviews moot (expect we’ll drop to 2.5 stars now). A more in-depth look at logo design review sites can be found on our blog.

5) See before you pay

The latest marketing ploy to lure people to logo designer’s web sites. Oh, it would be nice, for you the client, if this were true. After all, it presents a No Risk solution. You’re probably a little nervous about parting with your hard-earned cash, especially over the Internet, for a service that you’re unfamiliar with. Fair enough. Seeing your new company logos before you pay for them certainly sounds good (though if you’re nervous to begin with, it should concern you that you still have to supply these guys your credit card details when ordering your supposedly ‘see before you pay’ logos. They’ll claim that it’s to verify your age – not true – or that it’s to validate your identity – also not true). Alas, the pitch is only half of what it appears. Here’s the deal. What they’re doing is taking your project profile and rooting through their archives to find rejected designs, from old projects, to see if there’s anything that even comes close to want you’ve requested. Not exactly custom logo design as advertised. You take a look at the material presented and if you like, you buy (and they just happen to have your credit card number on file for those ‘snap’ buying decisions). If you don’t see anything you like, no time spent.

Could be a pretty cool way of doing things – if only they’d be up front about it. Turns out your ‘do not pay before you see custom design‘ is more like ‘do not pay until you find something you like from our pile of rejected logos‘ design. But that doesn’t sound too enticing. In the industry these ‘rejected’ files are referred to as Morgue Files – we have thousands of them. Alas, we don’t really have the heart to pass them off as original custom work to unsuspecting clients, so we give our Morgue Files away as free logos.