About Logos

Logos - Why Bother?

Many businesses make use of logos. These are graphic illustrations, sometimes with text, sometimes just made from stylised text alone. The logo becomes a shorthand reminder to people of the enterprise behind the logo, and what this enterprise stands for (the brand).

What Does It Say?

Let's think about the impression that graphic quality and design creates in the mind of those who see it.

Here's a graphic developed for a start-up design studio. It's about fun, passion, and freshness. It's crisp and clean. This relates to precision, and attention to detail. The shading gives depth to the image - it has substance.  It's colourful, and the colours are strong and bright, attracting attention. There is a sense of forward motion - it's on a mission and clearly going somewhere. This is a stylised logo appealing to people who want action and are open to fresh new ideas. Finally, it's looking forward with its head up - it's ready for any challenge!

Quality

Now, let's look at a similar logo in monochrome. This is what we started with. It looks flat and boring. This is not a memorable logo. While it's the same basic graphic, it doesn't grab our attention.  In fact it even looks vaguely threatening. The advantages of well designed logos are obvious.

What To Do?

It is worth every cent to get a competitively priced logo designed/developed by a professional. It's need not be expensive, and it can be used for newspaper, TV, web, screen prints, stationery and whatever else needs to have a logo on it. It will be supplied to you in various high quality commercial formats that printers, designers and others can use without quality degradation, such as in scalable vector format (so it can be resized without compromising quality).

Here's our logo. It's the same one we use on our website, created at fairly high resolution in a commercial graphics program. The original is in .svg format (scalable vector graphic) so we can resize it with little or no loss of quality/detail.

 

 

It may be hard to believe, but creating logos can be quite time consuming. To start with, we need to know about the business we're designing for. See the movie clip in our Blog Post on "Branding".

Then, a series of different designs and variations are required so the client has some choices to consider. Then, feedback from the client may require going back to the drawing board to do a re-work to properly fulfil the client's vision of what they want. Designers will usually allow for a couple of revisions within the original quote.

It Will Pay For Itself

Large organisations pay substantial fees for professional graphics because they consider that their image is an asset that contributes to their ability to attract and retain customers, to grow their business, and to set them apart from competitors.

Some large corporate logo projects can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Small business logo designs are much more affordable.

Even though the benefits are intangible, we're convinced high quality graphics in logos bring in business, and we suspect Coke, GM, Sony and any number of other successful corporations would agree.

What Does a Logo Cost?

In our experience professional designers will charge anywhere from $150 - $500 AU to design a custom logo for a small business.

Where To From Here?

If you're considering having a logo created, there are plenty of designers around who could do this for you. Just search Google for "Logo Designer" in your area.

Our first bit of advice is to get a written quote, and don't pay the full cost upfront! At most, pay a small deposit if requested to (say 10%) with the balance payable only when you're completely satisfied with the end product. Get this in writing.

Secondly, make sure the logo is unique, and hasn't been copied from elsewhere. This isn't easy, but you can request your designer to assure you of this in writing. Your designer will have the means to check their original design against what's already out there. There's never a rock solid guarantee that the same or similar logo isn't already in use purely by coincidence, but you'll at least have the designer's written assurance that they have applied reasonable due diligence efforts to avoid  their design knowingly infringing copyright or registered trademarks/designs.

Finally, make sure copyright is transferred from your designer to you. A simple written and signed agreement is all that's required. You should also consider having the design registered as your Trade Mark, at least in Australia.

Get in touch with us at www.webinate.com.au or call me on +61 419216000 if you need help or advice on logo design. Good Luck!