HN please help me pick a logo for my next startup-related project | Hacker News Reader

HN please help me pick a logo for my next startup-related project

99designs.com

17 pointsacangiano21 comments

This isn't how you should do branding. The point of branding should be to make your company, organization or in this case a blog stand out. Now if it doesn't matter what the logo looks like, then this is the way to go. However if you studied the rich history of editorial design you'd know that the yellow rectangle of National Geographic or the the bent page outline in red on the Time covers really made added to the personality of each brand. All of these "logos" look like something you've seen before; they've got second rate style but no substance; and sadly most of them look like they're for a cloud hosting service while the last one looks like it's for some vague non-profit for special kids.

Antonio do yourself a favor: Look at a dozen logos by Paul Rand, study the process behind them (Rand wrote several books) and then re-start your branding process.

The branding you describe is orthogonal to what acangiano is trying to do here. When launching a minimum viable product, it's best to go with a logo from 99designs and a Wordpress/WooThemes/whatever template. Essentially a minimum level of professionalism while focusing on building the core product. Lest you think I'm alone in this recommendation, Patrick wrote a bit about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697558. Attempting to brand like Time magazine right out of the gate for a small project like this is absolutely the wrong choice.

If you're doing an endeavor which is designed for the communications medium (which is different than software) the brand is part of the product. And I'm assuming that this is a professional project, if it isn't then don't even bother with the branding and just start writing said blog.

I hear you and thank you for your feedback. I truly appreciate the value of branding and design, but this wasn't a random choice.

The reason why I went with 99designs, is that I'd like to avoid making a big investment upfront. Instead I'd like to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and use a "placeholder logo".

If the site manages to demonstrate its value and take off (perhaps despite its logo), then I'll be certainty more willing to invest in its branding and design by assigning the redesign to a professional firm.

It's a compromise, and not an uncommon one at that. But I fully understand if you consider it a mistake.

I also dont like the cloud logo only becuase it would make me ignore your blog if I saw it. Ie a negative connotation. In fact I think no logo is better a better starting point for a blog.

I dont even know what the techcrunch logo is.

In your situation I would start with "StartupDream" written in a legible but non-boring font and start working on content. People read a blog because of its content. So focus on content content content.

Branding is a lot like software development in this respect. You can go cut-rate and get something that fits the requirements, nothing more. What you end up missing is insight into aspects of the project you might not have considered, optimizations that, while not strictly necessary, can greatly improve the user experience, and the attention to scalability and future iteration you only get with a longer-term business relationship.

As a graphic designer this site makes me want to cry. Logo design is not free and designers doing mock-ups for free is foolish.

What would you think of this idea: offer 2 tiers of competition:

Tier 1 for Junior designers - design the full logo for competition, winner gets full payment. Ideal for building a portfolio of logo designing capabilities, gaining exposure.

Tier 2 for Established Designers - after earning a certain amount of reputation or karma points (based on voting records), they can compete in a higher-level contest with fewer entries, but each legitimate entry gets a percentage of the final payout. Competition is split into 3 stages, rough-sketch, concept, and final version. Each stage, the top N logos are picked, and those top N earn a % cut of the total project fee. (It could be that N is based on how many logos the customer wants to see developed, maybe they could pick from 5,10,15,20 etc. and pay accordingly).

The basic idea is a compromise somewhere between every designer putting the full amount of design work on a project which could net you zero income just for the chance at doing it, and just picking a designer based on reputation and going with whatever they come up with. This system would let the designers who value their time to explore an idea if they like, and earn money progressively with how much time they put in, and how closely their idea matches the customer's needs. In this system, nobody would spend days perfecting / crafting a design just to wind up earning nothing, and nobody would rush through a design job just so that if they didn't win they wouldn't have invested too much time.

Designers doing mockups for free is probably a symptom of more designers looking for work than there are clients willing to pay designers. Why aren't people willing to pay? Is there a glut of people offering high quality services for cheap, or is it that clients can't see the value in the higher priced designers? What would be great would be a chart (backed by solid data of course) showing the ROI on an expensive logo vs cheap logo vs 99designs logo vs the logo made by a founder's teenage neighbor who just discovered photoshop and comic sans. With that kind of data it would be much easier to convince people that 99designs is a good or bad idea.

I tried to comment on these via the 99designs site, but the site was misbehaving for me. I'll just post them here instead:

#123, #114, #109, #112 feel a bit too busy for my liking, though I do like the shooting star.

#44 is nice - I really like the compact look and the small vertical rule between the cloud and the name. I'm not sure if the jagged line is supposed to be reminiscent of a chart-like metric, or if it's supposed to make you think of "shattering", as in you're hoping to really shake things up.

#30 - I kind of like the window design but the font shading feels a bit off to me.

#12 - Nice and clean. The blue seems a bit faded, but that may be intentional?

#8 - Makes me think of a charity / donation / non-profit organization.

Overall, I think I like #44 the best closely followed by #12.

Hi guys,

The Startup Dream will be my next blog/community/project. I ran a 99design contest, and I was wondering if I could enlist your help to pick a logo. I realize none of these are award winning (you get what you pay for), but I hope we can find a decent one.

I will detail my experience with 99designs when the site goes up within the next few weeks.

Thanks,

Antonio.

EDIT: Here is the design brief to learn more about the project: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-startup-drea...

EDIT 2: Illuminating and hilarious comments so far. I can always count on this community.

Having not used them yet, I'm eager to hear about your experience with 99designs!

I know it's meant to be a "cheap" alternative to working with a designer, but it's still a bit disappointing when the highest-rated logo of 25 averages a 3.3/5 rating (with four of the five rating options being positive).

If possible when you write the post up, could you talk about your options for a custom fit to your app? I see a lot of variance between these "best" options, so I wonder how much guidance you were allowed to provide (that is: whether the random assortment of styles, themes, and colors is on purpose or due to restrictions on the process).

I think it would help to know what your project is about. I'm inherently opposed to the logos with clouds in them - seems like they're just capitalizing on buzzwords, while making you sound like a hosting provider of some kind.

Sorry, here is the design brief: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-startup-drea...

I'm surprised they didn't link to it automatically.

Your business centers more around people/teams/collaboration than services. Clouds imply service-provider/hosting, which leaves #8 - people in the shape of a star - as the only sensible logo here.

Agreeing with everyone regarding the overuse of clouds, but here's a simple idea to mitigate that: incorporate those progressively larger bubbles that would appear beneath a "thought cloud" in a comic or illustration. That way there would be no question where it was representing "a cloud" which carries all of the connotations of "the cloud", or more specifically "a thought/idea/dream cloud".

I personally prefer this one: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-startup-drea...

It doesn't look that much like a cloud / hosting service, covers the idea of growing and looks fresh.

Altough I don't think it's perfekt yet, it could work.

#12 hands down. Simple and clean is the new in. The rest are way too loud or busy.

I've voted and was surprised to see the one I liked the least had the current highest vote!

I think even having a simple logo for an MVP is good, it gives a sense of focus.

none of them are great

Happy to help, Antonio.

It's a shame we couldn't have another section like we have for "jobs", but just for crowdsourced stuff like this. It's something I think a lot of people would like participating in, but, like jobs, it probably needs to go in its own category (for the same reasons.)

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