On Internet Business

Company logos: crowdsource v traditional design

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

One of the issues that preoccupies many new business owners is ‘image’. Along with ‘brand’ it’s the white-wall tyres of the start-up industry – the thing that every new business owner thinks they have to have to be cool! And they’re not entirely wrong – many businesses have foundered as much on failure to project a clear brand as on failure to offer a good product or service, while others, like Nike, are so utterly welded to the public consciousness by the nature of their branding that you only have to indicate their logo for everybody to know who you’re talking about.

So how does the small or new business owner go about establishing a company logo? Inc. has recently run an unscientific test to see how four services panned out for one small business owner.

Looking at their results, there’s quite a lot to think about before making a choice. While, for their small business owner, Hatchwise offered the service that delivered the logo he wanted, there are other ways of going about the process of finding a good logo.

Pros and Cons of Crowdsourcing

To begin with, there’s the question of time. While Logo Design Team offered a single contact point, the other services all require the buyer to communicate with multiple designers, which can be time-consuming in itself, without adding in the time needed to assess the draft designs adequately.

Then there’s the cost. While it can be as little as $99, what you get for that amount does seem to be very much a bargain bucket logo. As the cost increases, so does the quality of the design work, at least in this sample of one design brief. But then, at the top end of the price range, there’s a good chance that a recently qualified graphic designer would produce work of a similar calibre, and if you factor in the time cost of working with crowd-sourced ideas, you might find it’s cheaper that way.

Service is also an issue – once again Hatchwise came out on top in the article, both because it had the highest number of participants and because a comment made to one designer can be seen by all others, meaning that there isn’t the need for repetitive communication as there is with 99Designs. At Logosnap the burden is on the buyer to crawl through the designs that have been loaded onto the site, adding to the time/service burden and while both Logo Design Team and Hatchwise have found ways around the multiple communication issue, in neither case did it seem that the service received was notable enough for the business owner to comment favourably on it.

One positive aspect of crowdsourcing is price. In the end the buyer ended up spending less than $500 and was happy with his logo, but it took seven rounds of feedback to achieve it, and the chosen design actually bears very little relation to his original spec, suggesting that a lot of the iterations of the design might have been short-circuited if a single good designer had sat down for an hour with the client and swept away what he thought he wanted by suggesting what would work best!

But where does design end and branding begin? A downside of crowdsourcing a logo is that you don’t make any investment in research – so what you get is based on what you say you want and as this buyer found, sometimes what you want isn’t the best thing.

Conclusion
Crowdsourcing is a great way to get a logo design quickly and cheaply. So if brand image isn’t key to your success – perhaps because you’re at an early stage of business development and/or are trying out a range of ideas on the marketplace that you want to differentiate by brand at little cost – crowdsourcing may be right for you. After all, you can always amend/improve your logo later in the evolution of the business. However, once you’re past the start up stage and your brand is being seen by a large number of people, you need to differentiate your offer – at that point it is much more important to work with an experienced designer who understands your objectives and can contribute intelligent input to the designs for your corporate image.

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