A friend tried outsourcing a logo

To protect the identities of my friends and other people I’m going to keep most information in this post anonymous.

A couple of weeks ago a friend contacted me if I could help him mock up some items for his company. Essentially I had to put their logo on some items so they could see what they would look like. At first I thought that would be an easy task, especially because he told me he has all the logos in vector and can supply me with all the pictures and materials I need. The logo didn’t look to bad and I was supplied with a vector file. Well… things didn’t really go that smoothly.

Disaster

When I opened their “vector” logo I found out 2 things. That the logo was only partially in vector and that most of the assets in the design were lifted from the internet. Meaning the designer basically just googled a couple of images and pasted them together to create the logo. That’s stealing. Even if the site has free vectors to download, most of the time you need to pay a licensing fee to use it commercially. So basically he screwed them over.

I asked my friend about it and who the designer was. When I got the answer I wasn’t really surprised. He told me they outsourced the design to a website based in Singapore and the designer only charged 5 € for it. At first my reaction was: “WHY!?” Then I kindly told them that if anything sounds too good to be true IT IS!

You can NOT get a quality designed logo for 5 €. That’s just fact. And the bigger problem is that because he used resources lifted from other companies and websites the logo is basically useless. When we googled a couple of the elements we found out the “designer” basically just stole an icon from a google play app and pasted it in to the design.

The problems didn’t stop there. Most of the resources he used were bitmap and not vector, even if the source was in vector. I can’t really understand that but OK… Needles to say, the logo was useless as it was. So we spent a couple of hours fixing the design, redrawing some elements and replacing others.

Difference between vector and bitmap:

Outsourcing websites

In the last couple of years a website named Fiverr got quite popular. It’s basically a site where you can commission pretty much anything (within legal bounds of course). Video, audio and graphic design are rampant on the site and you could easily commission any kind of design for a couple of bucks. Don’t do that for a serious business. If you just need a design for casual use like children’s T-shirts or just home use then by all means, use the site. But to put things in to perspective companies spend thousands of dollars on designers to make memorable, classic logos. Don’t think you can get one like that for change.

So to make my point… Do NOT outsource logo designs to people you can’t keep regular contact with and don’t know what you are getting. Always check your designer’s resume and backgrounds. Don’t just blindly trust someone because he works through a website. Check out some of his other clients and ask them what they think about the designer. Bite the bullet and spend more money to get a decent logo design. A logo is basically your window to the marketing world. Without a good logo your marketing is of to a bad start.

If you like what I do and appreciate my posts and freebies, please consider supporting my work.