I decided that it’s time for me to invest in a professionally designed logo. The current fox you see on the site is actually a self-made logo which was originally created for an old technology blog of mine called TechVixen (the blog has since been sold and the logo was no longer in use). As you can see, the fox logo would have been more suitable to a site called TechVixen than to a site called Techalite.
I spent a long time late last night and today deciding whether I wanted to crowdsource. Alas, all of those rants by traditional designers made me choose against crowdsourcing for only two main reasons: expertise and (potential) plagiarism.
The decision to not crowdsource was quite a sudden turnaround for me, as just yesterday afternoon I was ready to submit my job to 99designs
I’m sure using a crowdsourcing site to get my logo designed would get me tons of totally awesome logos to choose from. But should I really be the one choosing which one I prefer? Doesn’t a professional logo designer probably know better what fits with my brand and image? I think so.
The other issue is everything I’ve been reading about designers on crowdsourcing sites using unoriginal designs, using each others’ designs with minimal modifications, etc. I’m not saying regular designers don’t do this – I’m sure they do. But it seems like a crowdsourcing site might host more of those designers who are just starting out or wanting to break into the industry or people who might be ok at making pretty graphics but aren’t really professional designers. It seems like maybe crowdsourcing my logo would expose me to more of the community that would have more of a risk of providing an unoriginal logo. The logo is a huge part of the brand – if anything should be original, it should.
So after a lot of thought I decided to try something new and hired The Logo Factory for my logo design. I know several totally awesome designers whom I could have approached with the job, but I’ve been feeling like experimenting lately (heh, experimenting with one of the most important symbols of your up-and-coming business. Good job, Liza).
That being said, I’m still not sure if I made the right decision. Don’t get me wrong, The Logo Factory has produced some totally awesome logos for their clients. But was it really the right decision to hire a traditional designer? I think it’s a matter of being doubtful whether I should have opted for all that choice. I do hope that The Logo Factory will take as much free rein as they need with my logo (and I communicated this in my original brief). If I’m hiring experts to design my logo I sure as heck want them to use their brainpower and expertise.
I’ll post more about my experiences with The Logo Factory as the job progresses.
Tags: 99designs, branding, crowdsourcing, logo, the logo factory
I think you have made the right choice going for a designer rather than crowdsourcing it. The logo factory is a little bit of a sausage factory, but does do some good work.
Make sure you get a logo that works in all mediums – for example on the rotating samples on the home page there are some that look more like clipart illustrations than logos – the Badland buggy, froggies bait dock, and big island colour and cinamon grove are awful logos in my opinion, and the “blue omega entertainment” even worse.
On the other hand Kalamata Greek Cuisine, electric lemonade, Ingena Consulting, Creative Genius Group, Arbourscapes tree care are all really strong logos that work well.
Basically what i’m saying – is you want a logo not some clipart with words or some weird 3d thing – some of their examples are excellent some are not, make sure you end up with one of the good ones!
Matt
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your comment. I quite like a couple of the logos you said were awful, to be honest! (Badland Buggy, for example, seems to really fit). I noticed that most of the ones you pointed out are illustrative logos and I see what you mean – some of them I just don’t like that much. The good thing is that because I don’t have a huge budget yet, I opted for their least expensive package which doesn’t actually include the illustrative logo option. So the logo I get out of it can be iconic, font-based, or graphic/linear, which are the three types I liked better anyway from what I saw on their site.
I have confidence that they’ll make a great logo, but if I end up with something that just doesn’t seem to fit for me I’ll keep looking at other options.
Thanks for your advice! It’s great to get some feedback.