People are always trying to “negotiate” with designers to get the “best deal”. Many of us are more than willing to help you work within your budget, but sometimes the requests are downright ridiculous. This video shows you just how ridiculous those requests sound.
Hat tip: Swissmiss
As a designer, I love a good infographic. The Indianapolis Star has a great video infographic showing the position of every car during the Indianapolis 500.
When budgets are tight, businesses try to cut expenses any way possible. This often means looking for “affordable” design solutions. Although crowdsourcing your logo may seem like a good way to save money, there are some reasons you should avoid this route.
The most obvious reason is amateur results. Sure, you’ll probably get at least one logo you like. And it might even look pretty good to grandma. But in the end, it would be a surprise if an experienced and trained designer actually took part. (Crowdsourcing looks a lot like “Spec” work to them.) This leaves you with something that might look okay, but doesn’t have the thought and research put into it to create a lasting mark.
There’s another reason to avoid the crowdsourcing route that you may not be aware of. The individuals that enter these contests are usually entering lots of other contests at the same time. The goal is to win as often and as “efficiently” as possible. To keep up the pace, they submit very similar logos to many different businesses, meaning your logo may not be nearly as original as you think.
Even worse, there’s always they chance you could get in legal trouble. Sadly, there have been several instances of individuals submitting art they have no permission to use. Sometimes they are misusing art they could legally use for other types of projects. Other times, they are actually stealing the art from another company. When you choose your favorite logo, you have no idea whether you truly have a legal right to use it or not.
Although hiring a respected designer to create your logo might cost more, you can be certain it is unique, targeted, and legal.
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Nate Voss has written an excellent post about this topic.
Don’t forget to celebrate pi, that incredibly useful constant. You can even toast the moment at 1:59.
I recently designed a logo for Code4Lib, a community of library software developers and technologists.
As with every design project, I started out by identifying the needs and desires of the client.
Code4Lib is run by consensus. They vote on everything. All the members of Code4Lib worked together to create guidelines for what they wanted/needed. Fortunately for me, volunteers then formed a committee to actually shepherd the project through to completion. Although all members expressed their opinions at different stages, the logo committee distilled everything to something reasonable to communicate.
I started out with several different logo ideas. Some went in more of a coding direction while others went in a library direction. After a great deal of back and forth over various ideas, the logo above was decided on. The serif font harkens back to printed books, while the brackets relate to the coding aspects.
Logos for other aspects of the Code4Lib community use the base logo, with the name of that activity incorporated into it. I designed a few derivative logos and figured out the appropriate font size, letter spacing, etc.
Because of the commitment to open source I tried to make the logo as “free” as possible. The main Code4Lib logo was created using the free font Centabel Book. I tried very hard to use a free font for the “activity” name as well, but could not find one that fit well. Although many programmers dislike Microsoft, I used a Microsoft font, which has the benefit of being available to a great number of people.
I also released the logo under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This allows the logo to be used by anyone for any purpose.
The saying goes that, “Design by Committee,” is hell, but that was clearly not the case. The committee was very knowledgeable, and the community as a whole was very receptive. It was a pleasure to work with the Code4Lib community to design their new logo.