The Importance of Being Original...

...or 'The Evolution of a Logo'

The whole issue about having a logo custom-designed for your business is an interesting one. I'm hearing a lot lately about people purchasing a logo for cheap-as-chips, and scratching their heads as to why someone else would fork out a larger amount of money for their custom-designed logo with a different designer.

It's a simple as this: Not all logos (or their designers) are created equal.

So you have to ask yourself what you're really paying for. You'll find plenty of information on the internet about what you need your logo to 'do', but why is it that some designers charge more than others? How is it that you can find a designer charging as little as $50 for a logo? Seems like a no-brainer to get a logo done by them, right?

Wrong.

Many of these designers use cheap clip art to knock out their logos, and repeat the same kind of design over and over again with multiple clients. You end up receiving an unoriginal, uninspiring logo that only succeeds in letting your business drown in a sea of similar unoriginal designs. Don't you want to stand out? Don't you want to leave your mark on the world? Isn't all the blood, sweat and tears you're putting into your business worth more than a cheapo $50 logo?

I can only use myself as an example here to show the evolution of one of my logo designs, to give you some insight into what goes into making an original design. I can guarantee all of the other talented, reputable designers out there go through a similar process, because we are all about listening to your needs, finding out about your business and how you want to market yourself, and coming up with something eye-catching and original to set you apart from your competitors.

Here's a recent logo design I did for Wee Willie Winkie. All of my logos start out with a brainstorming session with pencil and paper. I scribbled out a few different concepts for this logo, including this one which formed the basis of the final logo. It's a very simple, rudimentary sketch, but you can see the way my mind was working and how I pictured the energy and basic elements of the final logo:

After deciding on the overall theme of the logo, I went about sketching the Wee Willie character in finer detail. I doodled him a number of times until I was happy with his overall shape (he only had one leg! LOL. But I happily gave him a second one when redrawing him on the computer). You can see the evolution of the character below, from the initial sketch to the redrawing process on the computer:

I then set about drawing the backdrop to my character based on my original sketch. I came up with multiple concepts revolving around the same theme so I could see which one was working the best:

When my client chose the concept she loved the most, we moved onto refining it for her and changing some elements that better reflected how she wanted her business to be branded. You'll see we changed the Wee Willie character and also the backdrop to give it a more modern and contemporary feel, and reverted to a colour scheme closer to the previous branding so customers could relate to it:

It looks like a simple process here, but what it really involves is lots of questions, loads of emails back and forth, coming up with and then scrapping lots of concepts that aren't working, listening to a client's needs, understanding their business and what they need from their logo, and hours and hours of dedicated work. (It also involves copious amounts of tea and chocolate and butting your head against the desk when you can't get any ideas working...but that's beside the point).

THIS is what you are paying more money for a talented designer to do. Hence why not all designers are created equal, and some are totally worth their asking price (and probably more...)

I hope this gives some insight as to what is involved in creating a logo. Go forth and be original, people! Thanks for reading  :o)

'Til next time,
Sarah  :o)