99designs Launches $99 Logo Store
99designs.com
99designs.com
First, I'm surprised how little respect design gets in the tech industry and from programmers. Good design can sell a poor product or inform consumers about a superior product. It can drastically reduce support costs (UI design) or encourage consumers to pay a little more for a product (i.e. The Apple "Tax"). Design is important to the overall success of most business ventures and should be budgeted for and planned for accordingly.
These logo (I'll be nice here) marketplaces are better than design-it-yourself or no design at all in most cases. But you get what you pay for. Many of the designs will come from students that have little to no experience and an incomplete grasp of the principles of design. Most of the rest will come from international locales far away with different cultural identities and little understanding of yours. After all, a logo is not just something attractive, it communicates a message visually.
What you will get in abundance is poorly thought-out concepts, logos stolen or similar to others and rushed work with a total disregard to overall quality. Does your logo need to be legible from far away or at small sizes? They probably didn't account for that. Some of these logos will land you in court (trademark/copyright violations) and I guarantee the guy that "designed" it for you on these website will disappear.
Bottom line: These logos are great for a placeholder until you can afford a designer, until your product grows or launches or for presentations to investors, etc.
A 200 person asset management firm doesn't need couture design. They need competant bespoke tailoring. Same goes for a chain of dental offices, a regional law firm, an HVAC company, and most enterprise software companies.
Most businesses shouldn't be spending the kind of money Coke spends on a one-off project. Not for their entire company.
Your concerns about stolen logos are valid (like I said earlier, saw that happen). But those same concerns exist at the lower end of the custom "consultatative" design market as well. And the fact is, most of the logos on the 99designs logo market aren't stolen. They're just derivative and boring. Which is fine.
Yes, Coca-Cola spends a lot of money. I've seen plenty of projects where they've wasted it. That's not the point and this isn't about that particular company.
I'm not sure where this "couture" stuff comes from, nobody speaks that way outside the fashion industry. Those of us in the design industry make a point to design a logo that is appropriate to the client.
Which brings me to another point: communication. It doesn't exist in any realistic form in 99designs or any of their competition. A one-on-one relationship with a designer can steer the client away from trends and copy-cat design and towards something long-lasting, professional, appropriate and even affordable (how many of your can afford full 4-color offset for everything you produce including large-scale signage?). Professional design has little to do with being snotty or "couture." You wouldn't build your building without an architect and you shouldn't build your brand without a designer. A 1-person company (I've owned a few) can benefit greatly from a designer consulting on the identity.
When you think of design: think function. Don't focus on the form. Yes, a tremendous part of our education and experience is in creating something beautiful, efficient and visually engaging. But just as much is put in to something function correctly. I've saved clients thousands of dollars by designing materials to be more efficient.
If cost is a concern, go directly to the designer. Here's a little secret: creative directors don't really do shit. Designers come up with the ideas, create the iterations and execute them. Many design agencies pay their designers around $30/hour with few benefits while they charge $200+/hour. Find a designer you like (portfolios and references) and see if they can fit your budget.
Finally: If you can't afford a few hundred for a logo then you don't really have a business do you? It takes money to make money. If that kind of investment in your business isn't possible then you're either not serious or you're not going to make it anyway.
Developers and designers both have the same anal-retentive tendencies, this need for organization and perfection that we should get along so much better. And quite often we have to work together.
I'm guessing a lot of the hate comes from developers having to work with "those" designers: the ones that should have just become an artist/painter instead of designer. That's a whole different story.
You've noticed I've been especially loud on this thread. You're right. The thing that gets me going about designers, apart from the fact that I geek out on it, is that I help run a consulting company and I'm pretty attuned to the consulting business model. I think a lot of "brand design"-types oversell services that many or even most companies don't need.
Let's agree on one thing: nobody wants total crap. Nobody wants a beveled logotype set in Arial with a lens flare behind it. That quality of design exists and it is bad and most companies cannot get away with it: it makes them look unprofessional.
But then let me suggest --- controversially, I know --- that most companies don't want high-end design either. They aren't particularly well-served by poise and restraint. They don't need to communicate a feeling or mood outside of "we are the established, trustworthy financial services in this office park".
What they need to do is take one of a couple proven, shopworn concepts off the rack and have it tailored to their business. They don't need to think about it. They don't need to waste weeks of time looking at roughs and having internal contests to pick a winner. They can get away with looking at a book for 5 minutes, saying "that one!", and getting on with their lives.
(The rest of it: not only do I not own 99designs or a competing spec work firm, but I actually don't use spec designers at all; we contract with local designers, and we do the whole consultative design dance --- we're geeky that way, and this is a luxury we give ourselves. But we don't kid ourselves about the business value of that luxury.)
I have nothing else to say to you. I've made the value of design, real design, quite clear. If you don't understand that value, it's a personal problem.
Design is valuable, but that value is of significantly different importance depending on the businesses. For some business, it's a key part of what they do. For others, it's just a checklist item. For a few, professional design would probably be harmful. (Example: The Drudge Report)
Something tells me you're not, though.
Larger companies can (and should) shell out for design, but a smaller company should be spending a much smaller amount. They don't need a 150 page branding and style guide, they just need a logo for the top of the newsletter so they can present an image that's proportional to the size of their business.
I agree with your later points, but saying overspends here "Coca Cola overspends and has custom everything." is wrong and inconsitent with what you sya later.
I've done a bunch of designwork, including logos, for very small-scale projects like day-care centers, local sports organizations and so forth, and I can tell you they would be soo much better off just buying something they like from this place.
The marketplace isn't intended for Apple or Coca-Cola and any company understands the differences. No day-care center, no matter how stupid you think they are, pretend like they're getting the same for 99 bucks as they are with a professional design-firm. They don't want a professional design, they want something to stick on their letterhead for the annual newsletter.
These kinds of sites aren't competition to real designers, they offload crap-designers like me who would rather code.
I'm not saying that a logo has no importance, but as the lipstick and makeup of brands becomes more transparent and users are intent on knowing companies on a deeper level, I do see the traditional sense of brand styleguides diminishing, and while sites like CraigsList and reddit and TripAdvisor and OpenTable are finding phenomenal success despite amateur logos, I begin to question their importance more and more.
I had this discussion with chris a while back... he came up with a rather nice web 2.0 pastel logo for prgmr.com. I stuck with figlet. His argument was that a generic logo made people more comfortable, while I thought that the 'rounded corners' made me look like a knockoff. I'm pretty invested in my brand; like me or hate me, I want you to remember me.
I've seen $50k logos that were pretty ineffective. We've all seen HUGE branding campaigns fall face first. We've also seen cheap/free logos turn into icons (Google, Yahoo, Nike).
The difference in VALUE between a $99 logo here (or designed by a student designer abroad) and a $30,000 logo designed by a seasoned pro is NOT $29,000 for 99.9% of companies.
Interestingly enough-- this is true for a lot of coding tasks, too. Most web apps are simple CRUD apps that will never need to scale and don't really merit "rockstar" talent.
I don't think you need to sell anyone here on the value of good UX design and "good enough" graphic design. But GREAT graphic design clearly isn't a major factor in winning on the web. Don't believe me? Judged entirely on composition alone (i.e. ignoring their fame and success) how many of these sites would you be proud to have in your graphic design portfolio? http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US
Do not, under any circumstances, bring up 99 designs when speaking with a professional designer.
I warned you! But seriously, most entries for logo contests on 99 designs were already templates. If you look through a contest you'll see tons of leaves, swooshes, stylized people, etc... This just drives the cost down in most cases (the average contest is at least $99).
What's more relevant, there are a lot of quick-buck rip-offs created by simply copying a piece from http://logopond.com and tweaking it slightly. You buy one of these and you are on the hook for your name being dragged through the mud and for a copyright violation lawsuit.
Perhaps they have implemented a proper due diligence process for their $99 store, i.e. they do verify the authenticity and uniqueness of the design before accepting it for sale. If so, then great. If not, then just use http://brandstack.com which was the first place to let the designers sell their unused concepts.
Would you consider buying a logo here? I can see using it to get a quick-and-dirty logo for an early stage project, but I didn't see many I'd be excited to build a major brand on.
This is the democratization of design, where the Fortune 5 Million can have routine access to mass-customized graphic art somewhere above the quality of MS Word ClipArt and (I'll be charitable) below the quality of the designers who want to charge four figures for a logo which embodies the unique values and messaging of The Neighborhood Pizza Shop.
The median-quality logo here --- and I don't think this will give offense since you didn't do your own logo --- looks more professional than your current one.
If my designer gave me something which could pass muster at Microsoft or Apple, I would fire his ass and get something made for people who are scared of things that Microsoft and Apple make.
Do you think that if you A/B tested your favorite choice from this service that it'd meaningfully change your success? I don't hate your current logo, but as an (sorta ex) designer, I wouldn't nominate it for any awards. What is the business value of "embodying the unique values and messaging" of your business?
Related: trying to ignore what you've come to believe about Google, do you think their original logo embodied their unique values and messaging? I sure as heck don't.
My view is that the logo is a pretty damn tiny part of the BRAND-- and the brand is where the value is. Your business is awesome because of your brand. A great logo or crappy logo can nudge the quality of the brand but not as much as designers think.
If only we could convince Colin to try this experiment.
Probably not, honestly. I'm currently in the process of setting up a graphical A/B test for all my conversion buttons, which I think will majorly move the needle and give me ways to move it in the future. (Tweak button texts, tweak button colors, tweak button orders, etc etc. These are all hard for me in the status quo because I don't have the buttons ready to go, and I have the graphic design ability of a drunken lemur.)
This might not be obvious, but all A/B tests are not created equal in terms of implementation difficulty. The cheapest A/B test is a change to page copy: it is literally one line and done. I started three of them last night, testing microcopy in my shopping cart such as "You do not need an account to pay with a credit card through Paypal."
Buttons are a wee bit harder to A/B test because they're often seen in many pages throughout my site and, stupidly, they're not currently implemented as some sort of render :partial => '/static/easily_replaceable_buttons'. That means it is going to take me a couple hours to get the button tests ready sitewide, and I have to disable page caching to do it.
Yanking my logo is harder still. In addition to being on every page in the site (which means I have to turn off page caching entirely, which is going to require some thought about performance consequences), there are a few places where it is used offsite, for example in the top bar of my Paypal payment pages. Changing logos right at the shopping cart is probably not a great idea. Changing that sucker will require an hour or two of work, for boring technical reasons.
For some businesses, and perhaps some stage of nearly any business, a logo from the 99designs store seems perfectly reasonable to me.
You are going to get some good submissions, mediocre ones, and some crappy ones.
Be willing to pay a more than a $200 - $300, and you will get good submissions.
If you are a big corp, and have a huge brand to work on, you might not want to use them. If you just want to get something really decent looking out of the door, then they are really good choice.
Once your site/company/whatever, starts making millions, you can spend the money on high end designs.
At the end of the day you get what you pay for. Put your logo for $500, and it is guaranteed you will get a lot of good submissions (and a river of bad ones).
I honestly think this is much better than just working with a individual designer. The main reason is that you might get submissions that are really creative and you would have never thought of.
Again, if you pay pay $300 - $500 and you will get better results.
Considering I can contract out multiple iterations of a bespoke, cross-media, hand-dithered (e.g. newsprint, 4-color, b&w, web, etc.) logo for $1-$2k from full-service design/marketing firms HOW is this a competitive solution?
What project or firm who even tangentially cares about their brand identity would go down this path? Logos typically last the lifetime of the brand (years) and those sunk costs can be easily justified by that lengthy amortization.
Honestly, this seems like a service without a market; at least in the United States.
To demonstrate that, let's play a game. Go to Hoovers. Pick a major metro area. Drill down into "Banking & Finance", "Investment Management", and then drill into the 2nd or 3rd largest city in that metro area (in Chicago, that's something like Schaumburg or Naperville).
Now Google the top employers in the resulting set, and pick the company with the median-quality logo, and the company with the worst-quality logo.
I'm betting that in some major metros (Chicago is an example of this), the median and the worst-quality logo is worse than the typical 99designs logo.
In webtwopointopia, we're in a very status-conscious, egocentric estuary of the US economy. It's easy to forget that a lot of things we care deeply about (Helvetica! Not Arial!!!) are absolutely irrelevant to most customers.
Having lived in the Schaumburg area for several months also doubly-reinforces your argument.
Well-Played. Estuary indeed.
I'm betting that had this been available a year ago, one of these would be Patrick McKenzie's logo.
The only concern I have with 99designs is the policing. I'd like to know more about what they're doing to make sure the work up there is original --- a friend had a bad experience with this issue. If they can put a lid on that, I think this offering solves a huge problem.
I sympathize with the general point, but you're false in the specifics. I am totally willing to buy custom design at 3rd world prices rather than trying to shave that even farther and getting something which is generic.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/blog_logo.gif
I got three concepts done for the above from the same designer, and it cost me (checks records) $117 total. The two losing logos got shelved. Doing it the custom way let me get specify two things: that the BCC logo actually have a stylized bingo card on it (surprisingly hard to find in clip art -- trust me, I've looked) and that it use the blue/green color scheme I was going for.
But yeah, in general, design is too cheap these days for me to ever do a project without it. I kid you not, I have three applications to give conference presentations in the works at the moment and they all are getting custom logos. There is an 80/20 return to visual design and I want to get the 80 rather than wasting it.
I realize now how wrong I was.
It's not that technology will ultimately be able to replace creativity it's that it will commoditize some parts of it such as logo's, websites layouts etc.
Making a logo is not design it's illustration. You don't solve problems with logos you create a style.
Templates and logo's go hand in hand with the types of companies that needs them.
If your company can really be made with logos and templates then good for you.
I am happy there are companies out there such as 99designs, they make something that should be simple cheap.
But it's not design, it's not problem solving. The day that computers will be able to do that then we are all out of jobs anyway.
This is the Windows logo rotated 1/4 counter clockwise and skewed slightly...Hopefully they have some sort of way of reporting/dealing with issues like this (aka image stolen from somewhere else)
- Lachlan, CTO, 99designs.com
In programming, we have "design patterns" and such, that no-one would argue "hey, you copied me!" over. What about design patterns in logo design? I'm not a logo designer, but I find it hard to believe that each and every logo design is, or plausibly could be, designed entirely from scratch.
I think it is a pyramid scheme when someone has to complete a professional task for the slight chance of non noteworthy payment as a norm. It isn't sustainable.
That being said, this is a much better step. I see it being much more sustainable to everyone involved (and far less exploitative) for non custom logos being sold at a flat rate.
I'm on the other side of the spec-work debate as you; I respect where you're coming from but disagree that designers should exist in a market that functions differently from all other professional services.
I also think that this new, designer-"friendly", less-exploitative approach is going to do more violence to the bill rates of graphic designers than spec work contests ever could.
With this innovation in the business model, those 23 perfectly good crab shack logos aren't wasted: indeed, they can be applied to hundreds of crab shacks over the coming years.
Econ 101 suggests that if the supply of a good which was previously perishable a) vastly increases and b) is made nonperishable and c) sees transaction costs dwindle (because picking clothes off the rack is easier than detailing your needs to a tailor), well, price comes way the heck down.
In summary the logo creation didn't require a lot of time, I didn't even tried different proposals (no need to do so). It just come naturally. It was modeled together with the culture and the product itself (research, prototypes, mockups, etc). It was a (design) product of a visual evolution (more on this later).
[1] I wrote it this evenening (CET), it's related to this topic but not a response, http://www.pmura.com/blog/2010/03/kuse-vision-logo
In favour of them:
* they offer affordable logos
* you know exactly what you're getting for a fixed price
On the flipside, there is plenty wrong with these logos:
* Me too: if the logo's any good, there's a good chance someone else will buy it too. It would be like turning up to a party, and finding that you've got the same dress on (... a nightmare situation for some!)
* They look like $99 logos, or any other logo churned out by these companies
* It devalues the work of designers - a good designer understands what your company is about, and produces a fitting logo for you.
I'm sure there are many other fors/againsts than these, and it would be interesting to hear what others think of these services.
"All logos cost just $99, or if the logo has not been purchased before, you can buy it exclusively and own the full rights to the logo for an extra $199. "
I can see how this would be really attractive to many businesses; after all, most people who don't interact with designers on a regular basis view a logo as a very secondary matter, and if they can get a unique one for $300, that's probably good enough for them.
These people are probably crummy clients for any designer anyhow, so I don't feel like designers are really losing out. Heck, it might even be a worthwhile place to sell extra materials (e.g. logos that were not accepted).
http://www.daigger.com/about-us/index.jsp http://www.aleri.com/ http://www.emkay.com/flash/introPage/index.htm
(Selected at random from Hoovers).
Not one of them has a logo that is better than the median logo on this site.
My point is: this is great for a lot more than just mom-and-pop coffee shops.
I could use some designer help with an open source project I'm working on. http://grokphoto.org
And for the record, no, I never have and never will use one of these logo crowdsourcing shops. Great design is far too important imo.
"The first customer to purchase your logo has the option to buy all rights to your design. This will cost them an additional $199, bringing the total cost to $298. For some customers exclusivity is a must, so for them this option will be very compelling. "
The contest model at 99designs.com does between 550-600 new projects every week - That's dwarfs all other similar sites including CS combined.
Just FYI.
Cheers, Jason
One should probably just automate this. Pay $20 to istockphoto for a piece of vector art and put the company name beside it. That's an easy made $79. So if easterbunny inc. needs logo, just license http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-11054108-rabbi... and you're done. The quality would be comparable to those logo templates.
Many people obviously have started to believe that a logo is a bit of illustration plus your name.