How much is the fish II
Many companies and individuals quite often fail to understand the impact and importance of a good designed brand, which puts the design task at the bottom of the things to invest into. To make matters worse, so called “speculative work” or “crowdsourcing” adds up to the mess, where proclaimed “designers” (mostly from 3rd world countries) create logos for free, in hope to be the chosen from a vast number of competitors by a client and get paid a few bucks for the effort. As a result, the client might be happy to just have spent $5 on their logo, they are not aware how much they harmed all the designers who lost the pitch, but also themselves, and/or their own company.
You get what you paid for
Most of those who start a business in their field have come a long way. They studied hard to get their degrees. Naturally, they want their strengths and skills to be taken seriously. In order to be taken seriously, everyone must reflect this not only by showing their paper, but also in their outer appearance. If you don’t dress and act accordingly when attending a job interview for example, failure is pretty much guaranteed. Same thing would apply to your company’s appearance. You can have the best product, the best service, but if your corporate identity doesn’t match, you will not be perceived like you’d wish to be. Canned fish might be cheap, but is surely not as tasty as fresh sushi.
Behind the scenes
Many get the impression that a design is a quick and easy job, especially with the help of a computer. Apart from the computer itself and the software to create design easily costs a couple of thousand bucks, it’s far more than pushing pxls and running a few filters. In order to create a professional and high quality design, it takes many steps before even one pxl is pushed. Here is a glimpse of the process going on behind the scenes:
Brief: Discussing the basics (audience, services…) with the client to get an idea of the client’s perspectives
Research: Collecting information on audience, history, the industry itself and positioning the client within
Sketching: First rough visualizations of ideas based on the research and design brief
Visualization: Sorting ideas and creating potential candidates for the final design communicating the ideas with the client, discussing minor changes and feedback
Presentation: Showing the final candidates which mostly results in the choice of the final design
As you can see, there is far more to this than meets your eye. The whole process can take weeks or even months to complete. It shouldn’t be hard to see now, that design of this quality has to cost more than $5.
Still… it doesn’t have to cost a fortune
Each company, organization or individual has different needs. The costs can be adjusted accordingly depending on their demands and budget. There no need to fear of investing in a professional design, that gives you the appearance a company and their audience deserve. Just like with other items, it does make a difference whether you buy a cheap low quality product, or are willing to invest a little more for something that will last you longer. The choice is yours.
Originally published at www.designbypxlgirl.com on August 20, 2014.
