Startup Branding: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs

As a hacker/founder who has also taken up the art/design role, I disagree and think that developers who can draw reasonably well should try designing the art assets for their startups.

When you design your own art assets, you can iterate on the design in a much more incremental way because the transaction cost of going out and finding a designer is quite high. When you can design your own assets in-house, the art can work its way into the core of the product better and ends up in more places. For instance, many of the modules my startup has released have silly cartoons that I drew: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-open-sources-90-nod...

When there are external barriers to art, you're probably going to use it less. Contracting out for all of those silly readme cartoons would be wildly uneconomical but for me it provides a nice refuge from coding all day that happens to help us establish credibility with potential customers and expand our product exposure.

If you are a developer who is going to try your hand at doing the art yourself, I wouldn't be too concerned if your initial attempts look amateurish. Our earliest prototype looked really bad:

http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-1.png

but we iterated and made it a little better:

http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-3.png

and then did a redesign recently:

http://browserling.com/

Make some art!

I completely disagree with the author saying that the name isn't important, and with his citing "a great story" (especially one about Xerox) as "proof" of this. Most startups will never become a common word like Xerox or Google, and having a name that is both easy to remember and easy to link to the core benefit they offer is very important.

> 5. Any tips on where to find a great freelance designer for a startup logo?

Most designers these days seem to hang on http://dribbble.com/. That's a good way to find people.

I also looked for blog posts like this one about "logo designers you should follow on twitter", by a fellow logo designer:

http://www.brandclay.com/blog/people-you-have-to-be-followin...

Just go through people's portfolios and find work that you like.

For the record, my logo was done by http://www.tywilkins.com/

I think every startup would love to have a talented designer to work on the logo (and also the site). Budget is always the biggest reason it doesn't happen as soon as it should.

I haven't gone down the road of using sites like http://dribbble.com and carbonmade.com to inquire about designers and their work. It seems worth the investment of time to get a good designer for the right budget. Design shops tend to be too expensive for startups with $150/hour average rate.

Regarding finding a designer, I highly recommend visiting your local university's masters of fine arts students.