The Startup’s Guide to Budget Design
blog.folyo.me
blog.folyo.me
Visual branding (Which is really all we're talking about here. It's logos, etc. Not many of the other things that sit in the design/ux skill set) is directly related to the product/market fit of your company.
Harrods and Wallmart have different branding because they're aimed at different markets and are selling different things.
What have we learned about building startups of late? That people's original ideas of their product/market are often way out. As you start pushing our MVPs and getting real feedback the original ideas about product and market get pushed in new and interesting directions.
So investing a lot of time and money in strong visual branding at an early stage in a startup is often going to be a mistake. The market the brand is targeting and the values that the brand is trying to communicate will almost certainly change as the startup progresses.
Indeed, with the right perspective, you can look at the lean startup process as being a brand discovery process. My approach to branding startups is now to start cheap and neutral, and then refine later on as product/market fit becomes clearer.
If folks find this idea resonates, they might like find these of interest:
* https://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/What-is-a-lean-approach-...
* https://www.quora.com/At-what-point-should-branding-become-a...
* http://www.slideshare.net/willevans/introduction-to-leanux-b...
I didn't know it was explicitly forbidden by their terms of service, although I wonder where they draw the line between a "logo" and an "illustration".
To me it seems like their restriction applies to using stock art as an actual logo for a real product, not as a quick placeholder for an MVP or landing page.
I think people tend to get into problems when their level of expectations don't match their budget. So if you have less than $500 don't expect a real designer to treat you better than a full service agency. Also don't hire an agency unless you have someone on your staff who's a real point person and actually knows something about the project domain.
Why is this a problem? Shutterstock does not allow it's artwork to be used in logo's. See legal: You may not use any Image (in whole or in part) as a trademark, service mark, logo, or other indication of origin, or as part thereof , or to otherwise endorse or imply the endorsement of any goods and/or services. http://www.shutterstock.com/licensing.mhtml
You could have received something like this: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-89416879/stock-vector-paper-...
or tis one: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-100932412/stock-vector-city-...
This one looks cool: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-75302035/stock-vector-vector...
Remember, this is vector. Each and every part of this can be altered. Something I would really advice.
In this situation I guess he'll have to contact the designer, confront him with the shutterstock image and hope for an explanation, but what will be the outcome of all this? And isn't it there an extended license to allow full rights of the image?
I would place most emphasis on hiring a designer or find a design co-founder. The more common option, is a technical founder with a understanding of good design/usability, that seems to get you quite far too.
If you're a poor startup, the objective is to solve a problem. You can solve a problem without great design, just as you can solve a problem without great programming, or great copywriting, or great hosting, or any of the elements of building and running a startup. The only thing a startup has to do exceptionally well, I think, is to solve the problem it sets out to solve.
I know some designers who have started startups and naturally, their pages are beautiful. I could make a similar argument about how development/architecture should come first. Their apps will never scale, and if they'd had a good solid architect in at the start, we could have solved all their IT issues. That may or may not be true of course, but it's easy for me to make the statement that I could have helped and I'm probably right more than I'm not (just as you are) -- but that misses the point that except where funded, startups should focus on the things they can do well until they can prove the market or figure out if the idea has legs. Once you've proven that there's a benefit, or a customer base, or a way to make money, then you can start to pay money for things to make something more well-rounded.
Note: I'm re-reading this before I submit, and I can't tell if I sound like a giant prick or not, so please be aware that wasn't my intent. Your statement is of course valid, and I would personally love for startups to be better in UI/UX; I just wanted to posit that startups can't be good at everything and still be quickly built / cheaply built / etc.
I see design and development as symbiotic, and I wish I saw more start-ups using both to solve problems, rather than an over-reliance on the back-end and then shoving bootstrap, or a $10 template on the front.
And don't get me wrong, there is a place for these type of templates and crowd sourced art. But if your product is a web based service, you can't rely on clipart and templates to solve a problem effectively for the person using it.
I certainly agree that design helps, and if nothing else, it helps traction. Stripe is an example of something that could suck, but works so well that it would still solve a problem. That said, it doesn't hurt that their product is gorgeous, and it certainly makes it more sticky in mindshare. I still remember how giddy I got when I noticed that their documentation uses your actual API keys instead of having the dumb old "<INSERT_YOUR_API_KEY>" you see everywhere else.
I'd have still used Stripe either way, but the fit and finish throughout made me a staunch advocate for its ease of use to everybody that's ever asked me.
In counterpoint, Dotcloud is the cloud hosting provider I generally believe to be "the best". Their homepage has come a long way, and if Solomon or any other Dotclouders are reading this, I apologize in advance, but it used to be downright ugly. On top of that, the dashboard they provided obviously had an abysmal level of fit and finish, and while some of its warts persist, it's come a long way. That their product wasn't beautiful absolutely impeded my use of it in no way whatsoever. It is easily the 'best' way to deploy code for a variety of services, whether or not it's attractive, or even 'complete'.
So long as the pain you ease is substantially greater than the pain you are introducing, the product can work.
I agree that isn't an excuse for bad design, but the notion that better design makes something better isn't necessarily a reason to always pay top dollar for it. If you can get design on the cheap (either Bootstrap or similar products), through 99 Designs, or even by just reading a book, and execute in other areas, then you'll likely come out ahead, and revisit the design when it's more easily affordable.
The point though, is that the same thing could be said for engineering. Bring in only the minimum you need to solve the problem you're trying to solve. If you don't have a rockstar engineer, but do have somebody that can mock up a proof of concept that may or may not scale, that's what you should push forward with.
Like I meant to say in my previous post, I feel like we agree more than we disagree, I was just trying to point out that the priority #1 for a bootstrapped startup should be pushing product out the door. If it's ugly, won't scale, whatever -- ship product. Would a more attractive product be better? Of course it would, but that shouldn't slow down shipping.
It's a crapshoot. You can spend $10,000+ and end up with essentially nothing.
Maybe that's the problem I had with this post--no project parameters are visible. Because it's not like you can walk into a big-budget agency and they say, "for $10,000 we can build you either a logo or an app. But not both."
When you walk into a big-budget agency, you will be lucky if you can get penciled onto their calendar in about a month.
When you walk into a small agency, they'll meet with you right there for a few minutes, then probably never call you back because demand is too high and you sound like a cheap client, asking where your $10,000 will get you. Now, for low-end small agencies, the reverse is true. They will never call you back because they can't figure out why someone would pay $10K for design, and it scares them. I have seen that happen.
When you chat up a highly-skilled individual freelancer, he/she will immediately try to figure out which you value more: Good design or budget integrity. High-value freelancers, working as individuals, are known to take on projects of $50K and higher. They have a great reputation and are hired by people who are good delegators with a need to solve a distant problem effectively.
Demand for high-value, professional design services is extremely high. Here at HN the startup culture is always squawking about the cost of design, but the demand really is there. For every "I am willing to pay you $XXXX for a website" phone call I get, I can invent 2-3 opportunities of my own to contact existing clients and sell them on an idea that will cost them $XX,XXX. This is not some secret where I am keeping them from discovering cheap designers. It's how professional design works. I know their business. I pitch an idea that makes them stand out. They go after it.
Anyway, telling people that they can (or should) hire a big-budget agency with their $10K is pretty misleading.
But in my experience it's the upper bound of most initial design budgets on Folyo, that's why I picked that number.
You do allow designers to list their dribbble profiles in their profiles-- In fact many of the designers on Folyo have empty profiles, but then have super decorated profiles on dribbble, for example:
http://folyo.me/designers/1224 and http://dribbble.com/seanbunton
Just kinda tired of this "hidden" promotion via blog posts and was hoping you'd be a bit less impartial and include the real leader in the space. Other than this obvious omission, it's a quality article.
I wanted something cheap to put together an MVP. I quit on the project (for reasons unrelated to the logo).
So, I'll be curious to see if you find design flaws... but I'm glad I didn't spend much on the design no matter what faults it has.
A contest on 99d is simply a precursor to further work. Once I find the designer they will earn a lot more than the prize on offer. I find this to be more effective than big agencies because they are hit and miss - but way more expensive when missed!
I have also used 99d to simply browse successful projects and approach designers directly without a contest. Sometimes they have a style I like, so I hire them.
With regard to "design" - I ALWAYS separate functional from aesthetics. Most "web designers" that I've encountered have no clue when it comes to function and process. Safer to give them a wire frame and let them make it pretty. If you can't come up with a sensible wire frame then your website has bigger problems than how nice it looks. I always think Hollywood for design: story, storyboard then production. A designer can't provide the story - you must do that!
The idea of this post is more to say "if this is your budget, here are the options that are available to you" rather than give out precise costs for different jobs (which is hard to do, but I gave it a shot here: http://blog.folyo.me/how-much-does-a-website-cost-and-other-...)
why pay for design if I can copy something(+small modifications)?