June 13, 2017

Why Logo Design Need Not Be Expensive?

If you are a small business or planning to start up, you must read this.

You must have heard or read somewhere that logo design is an expensive process and good logo designers charge a lot. Well, this was indeed true few years back due to various reasons like – very few qualified designers, expensive software licenses and difficult to research industries and trend. But today if a logo designer or a logo design firm use these as reasons to justify why they charge a bomb for a logo, you should be wary of them.

Logo design isn’t a mechanical process and requires creativity and research. However even the most complex of processes can be optimized and made cost effective, if done properly. Find out why you don’t always need an expensive logo designer or an expensive logo design firm to get your logo designed.

Reduced cost of design software licenses

The heading may look misleading because the software license costs haven’t certainly come down but please read on.

Sometime back Adobe had the monopoly in vector graphic design software (i.e. Adobe Illustrator) and some may argue that it still is the case. Adobe has been increasing the price of it’s software over the years and some time back they moved to a subscription model where designers and/or firms need to pay a recurring fee annually (or monthly) which makes the software even more expensive. Now, this is one of the main reason why designers aren’t cheap because they need to accommodate the licensing costs of design software in their services.

However in recent years, there have been new players in vector design software like Affinity Designer, which are equally good as Adobe Illustrator and costs a very small one-time fee compared to Adobe products. As an example, we at 40dollarlogo.com, switched to Affinity Designer from Adobe Illustrator some one and half year back and have been very happy with it’s capabilities. It has matured a lot during this time and their team has been doing a great job at adding new features. Affinity products have helped us keep the cost of our services significantly lower than our competitors.

Now if a logo design company charges more because they use expensive design software like Adobe then that’s not your problem. Right?

Ease of researching industry, trends and competitors

Back in the days without Internet, it was a humongous task to research the industry, trends, competitors and other information for designing a logo. It used to take considerable amount of time in meetings and even visits to libraries but today, all this information is available in a few clicks.

Increased availability of qualified designers

Few years back, it wasn’t easy to find qualified designers for logo design which resulted in higher price for branding solutions. However today, the scenario has completely changed due to more exposure of design field and increase in number of good design institutes.

The simple economic principle – when supply increases, costs come down – is applicable here as well. Qualified designers are readily available which not only solves this issue but also due to competition, helps keeping costs further down.

Location Advantage

It’s true that education and cost of living varies significantly from one country to another. As an example, it would be fair for a logo designer based in United States or Europe to charge more than another designer based in a country where education and cost of living doesn’t cost as much even if the quality of work is similar. But as a business, shouldn’t you be looking to get the best value from the money that you plan to spend on logo design?

Clearly, logo designers and companies based in certain geographical locations have that advantage and they pass on the advantage to their clients. Nothing wrong in that!

Conclusion

If you are a small business with limited budget or just starting up a bootstrapped venture, is that wise to spend thousands (or hundreds) of dollars on logo design? And what’s the guarantee that after spending those thousands (or hundreds) of your hard earned money will result in an expected outcome? Similarly, there is no guarantee that the outcome from a relatively low cost logo designer or a logo design company would not be as good as that you expected from the expensive ones? Think about it!