
What Kind of Logo Do You Get for $5? - sebgeelen
https://medium.com/@sachagreif/in-the-past-couple-years-startups-have-started-realizing-that-good-design-can-make-the-difference-2fdeb90d390a
======
onion2k
This is how disruption works. Fiverr are doing to the graphic design industry
_exactly_ the sort of disruption that many of the startups we admire have been
doing in other sectors for years - vastly reducing the price to the end user
by using software to connect them with the lowest cost supplier. Exactly as
the taxi industry decries Uber saying UberX isn't as professional or safe or
fast, the design people are saying that the user is getting a raw deal as the
product they buy is demonstrably inferior, stolen, ill-thought and slow. Just
as Google did to advertising, Youtube did for television, Spotify did for
music, and AirBNB did for hotels.

The incumbents all said the upstarts offered a worse service while failing to
understand that there are huge numbers of people that don't want, or care
about, the 'essential' qualities that the incumbents insist on selling.
Disruption is made possible where an industry charges for things that
represent no value to the customer. In the case of Fiverr, fortunately I
think, their customers are people who want a logo that's better than what they
can make themselves but without the bells and whistles like rounds of design
changes, high quality vector artwork and Pantone reference colours. Designers
think they need to charge for those things. They are wrong. Lots of customers
are quite happy taking what they're given if the price is low enough.

And one day this _will_ come to the software industry. Someone _will_ make a
service that enables businesses to build applications for $5. Apps that work,
that scale, and that are 'good enough' not to need a developer any more. We
will have to change the way we sell what we do, just as Fiverr is going to
make designers have to think about the way they sell their services now.

~~~
Alupis
There is no "bait and switch" here as the author claims.

Nowhere on Fivver's website do they claim you are getting a unique one-of-a-
kind hand-designed logo -- you are paying $5 for someone else to tell you what
a sensible logo should be and provide a few decent choices for starting out
with... and that can be valuable (I know because as an engineer, the creative
side of things often escape me).

I see no issue here. For my side project websites and companies, these sorts
of logos (and at this price point) is exactly what I would look for.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Nowhere on Fivver's website do they claim you are getting a unique one-of-a-
kind hand-designed logo

I'm sorry, but if someone says in their profile headline, "I will design
amazing logos for $5" then I expect it to be more than just clipart or color-
shaded text.

~~~
Alupis
Well, honestly, most company logo's are not much more than clipart. Apple's
logo, an apple... Microsoft's logo, 4 squares, IBM's logo, their name, etc
etc.

I think you can't expect to buy a Ferrari at the Hyundai price point. If you
want more, you're going to have to pay more.

~~~
DavidMcG
I think there's crossed wires here. The term clipart was being used to refer
to the literal nature of the icons origin - it came from a stock library of
pre produced graphics.

And when you say 'most company logo's are not much more than clipart' \-
you're refering the the simple construction and form of the icon used in a
logo. Apple, Microsoft, and IBM obviously didn't pull their logos from a stock
library.

Although it's interesting to hear such logo's be described with such flippant
regard for their conception.

------
ensignavenger
Apparently the work wasn't really stolen- it was a stock design that was
(presumably) paid for. I would not call it a rip-off, and would ask "what
about fiver makes people think they are going to get completely original
designs?" If fiver (or their designers) are indeed somehow misleading
customers into thinking their design is completely original, with no stock art
involved, that is a problem- but it seems clear to me that for 5 bucks that
you would be starting from stock.

~~~
sphericalgames
Certainly on iStockPhoto there is a license restriction clause which states it
can't be use in any logo or trademark.

[http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses](http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses)

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of restriction is common in most stock
photo sites.

~~~
ensignavenger
I did some quick looking at the stock sites featured in the article:

Dreamstime:
[http://www.dreamstime.com/terms#unauthorized](http://www.dreamstime.com/terms#unauthorized)
Apparently you can use it in a logo, but you cannot trademark it- which
resolves the problem of someone trademarking it and suing you- their trademark
would be infringing the license.

123rf:
[http://www.123rf.com/license.php?type=enhanced](http://www.123rf.com/license.php?type=enhanced)

Yes, this license does forbid use on logos, so that designer apparently did
indeed violate the license. The designer should have read the fine print.

Freelancer: I couldn't find terms for stock work, however, the headline in the
screenshot is "travel agency logo" so based on that, it appears it is meant to
be a stock logo.

So, it appears that 2 out of 3 of the sites do allow us of their artwork in
logos. It may not be a good idea, but in these 2 cases, I would not call it
stealing. Nor would I expect anything more for 5 bucks.

------
jere
I'm confused. How is using a stock template a "rip-off"? If you design
something with a stock photo, is your entire design a rip-off? If you use a
popular library such as Bootstrap, is your site a rip-off? It's lazy, sure.
But you honestly weren't expecting anything else.

>There’s nothing wrong with going with a cheaper freelancer instead of hiring
an expensive agency, just like there’s nothing wrong with choosing McDonalds
over a 3-star restaurant.

Totally, but this is like reviewing an egg mcfuffin and being disappointed
they didn't serve you pastured eggs. There's a disclaimer near the beginning
of the article about a potential conflict of interest. When I first read it, I
blew it off thinking "oh that's not necessary, this is just a bit of fun." In
hindsight, the article reads like an ad. I was expecting a little more from
the tag line "An epic tale of deception, stolen artwork, and crappy logos."

~~~
d23
Whoa, that's one hell of a bullshit disclaimer. Even after reading it (and
it's not exactly highlighted), it was unclear that Folyo was his company.
Definitely sketchy.

~~~
vonklaus
To be fair to the author, in the disclaimer it is stated, "my startup Folyo".
So it is pretty clear that an opinion and competing biz model are assumed,
which is why their is a disclosure. The conclusions can certainly be disputed
though

------
ggambetta
To add a related experience, but with different results... some months ago I
used 99designs to get a cover for my novel. It wasn't $5 but $300, but still,
I was amazed by the quality of [some of] the entries - 126 in total! See here:
[https://99designs.com/book-cover-design/contests/book-
cover-...](https://99designs.com/book-cover-design/contests/book-cover-action-
thriller-novel-golden-seed-277703) In this case the freelancers were
_required_ to disclose the licenses of the assets they used, and even provide
the sources so I could verify them.

I understand why some artists complain about sites like these, but for a
"consumer" like me it's a fantastic idea - and as another commenter said,
"disruption". They do other things, like UI design and so on... check them
out. FWIW, I'm in no way affiliated to 99designs, I just had a good experience
with them.

~~~
slantyyz
We used 99designs and were happy with their work too. Our competition offered
something like $700 -- we wanted to ensure that the better designers pitched
for our logo while still being affordable to us.

What I noticed and found interesting was that the designers who participate in
99designs would do a lot of "police work" by calling out plagiarism and reuse
by the other designers. I'm guessing that it's because more money was at stake
than $5.

------
michaelbuckbee
Then, at the other end of the scale, you have 'What kind of logo do you get
for several million dollars?'

Aka, the Pepsi Gravitation Field:

[https://code.google.com/p/daxp/downloads/detail?name=pepsi%2...](https://code.google.com/p/daxp/downloads/detail?name=pepsi%20gravitational%20field.pdf)

Where their logo redesign was pumped up by a fantastic amount of tenuous
justifications and logic.

~~~
jere
Woooow. Thank you for that. It's so bad that it sounds like parody.

~~~
AndrewNCarr
The missing link between the new Pepsi logo and TimeCube!

Saddest thing is I can see a board room eating this up. Remember when Marissa
Mayer redesigned the Yahoo logo with a small team over a weekend? "no straight
lines in nature" she said. Sounds good, except it is wrong.

------
dbg31415
I always ask clients if they would go with a $5 plumber, or a $5 bus driver
for their kids. Always the response is, "No!" So it's a matter of them not
being able to judge quality of tech / design work... not just them being
cheap. Any small business is going to want to pinch pennies, but if you know
they make irrational decisions you should just walk away.

The cure, I think, is for our industry to develop non-subjective ways of
saying, "I'm a level 60 Developer spec'd for RoR," or, "Designer with .333
Batting Average stepping up to the plate." So customers can compare apples to
apples when looking at the billable rate.

If you think $5 logos are the only ones who plagiarize; I've seen this from
people who charge $150 / hour too. It's still very much the wild wild west and
the likelihood of someone getting ripped off doesn't seem to change no matter
how much the service provider charges.

~~~
gabemart
>I always ask clients if they would go with a $5 plumber, or a $5 bus driver
for their kids. Always the response is, "No!" So it's a matter of them not
being able to judge quality of tech / design work...

A $5 plumber might flood your offices. A $5 bus driver might crash the bus
your kids are in. A $5 logo designer might... design a logo for you that isn't
great?

~~~
molf
A $5 logo designer might steal copyrighted work and get you into all sorts of
expensive legal trouble.

------
ohashi
I got my company's logo on Fiverr and wrote about the experience a couple
years ago. Quite happy with the result honestly. It offended a lot of people
then (feel free to read the comments), and probably still does today. But I've
heard designers at $100+/hr down to Fiverr and they serve different purposes.
I've been happy with both and disappointed in both types (and everything in
between). I wouldn't hesitate to give it a shot though, it's so cheap you're
not really losing much budget if you have to go another direction.

[http://kevinohashi.com/26/10/2012/how-get-
logo-30](http://kevinohashi.com/26/10/2012/how-get-logo-30)

~~~
munificent
In your article you say:

> A logo is what identifies you. It's the symbol that takes up space in a
> customer's mind when they think about your company. There is no symbol that
> is more connected to your company than a logo.

And then you end up with a logo that is, frankly, awful. Which means now
customers will associate that awfulness with your company. Is that what you
want?

~~~
ohashi
Some companies aren't lasting brands. Mine happens to fall into that category.
Nobody has ever given a shit about my logo except from that post.

The service I provide, if it does its job well, is something you never should
need to go back to ever again. Almost all my visitors are one time visitors
and there is little/no return value on what I do. So, in this instance,
customers never think of my brand. So it really doesn't matter.

And you say it's awful. I don't think it's awful. It's functional. It doesn't
distract from everything else, it doesn't add anything special. That's good
enough. I don't want people thinking about my logo, I want them getting what
they need and leaving.

~~~
munificent
> It's functional. It doesn't distract from everything else, it doesn't add
> anything special. That's good enough. I don't want people thinking about my
> logo, I want them getting what they need and leaving.

This is true of most logos. The opposite of "awful" isn't "shoots out rainbows
that dazzle and disorient the viewer".

The logo should look like it was done carefully and with attention to detail.
It should be balanced and pleasant to look at. Even subconsciously, people
will pick up on those qualities (or their lack) and infer the same about your
company.

I don't mean to slag on your logo. I know it's probably not a priority for
you. But it does a disservice to others to say, "Look how easy it is to solve
your logo problem!" when the end result you got was actually pretty poor.

In particular, the outermost "radio" arc cuts unpleasantly close to the "S".
It doesn't match any of the other spacing and makes the "S" look like it has
some weird thing attached to it. The other arc is thinner for no clear reason
and the spacing between it and the dot over the "i" and the outer arc is
inconsistent.

To my eye, the whole set of arcs is too tall and makes the outline of the
entire logo look unbalanced.

Also, the kerning around the first "e" is bad.

I understand you think no one cares about your logo, but you took the time to
animate it and put it a video. Why not at least drop a bit of cash beforehand
and make sure it's worth reusing?

Argh. I hate being negative without being helpful. Here's something like I had
in mind: [http://imgur.com/bpUqyKd](http://imgur.com/bpUqyKd)

Do with it as you will.

------
joosters
They should have tried
[http://www.horriblelogos.com/](http://www.horriblelogos.com/) \- $5 for a
hand-drawn logo, so no stock artwork involved.

(Logo will still suck though :)

------
gambiting
"Yet it also seemed too good to be true: how on earth could anybody make a
living creating logos for $5?"

$5 is 3x minimum hourly wage in Poland. And you can create more than one logo
in three hours.

------
jeremymcanally
Neat experiment. Buying design through places like Fiverr is a hard
proposition (unlike, say, voice over or something) because faking and fraud is
so easy. But let's not pretend this is relegated to things like Fiverr.

I've paid pretty good money for web design work before only to find out later
it was recycled or stolen from an open source project, grabbed off ThemeForest
and re-colored, or straight copied and pasted off someone else's website. I
worked with a startup that hired through a High Class™ marketplace for a lot
of dough and they ended up with a logo that the designers eventually admitted
was "heavily inspired" by another popular logo.

Just because you pay more doesn't mean you get a more honest vendor.

------
sgdesign
Author here. Just to address the point that just because these logos are based
on stock templates, doesn't mean they are rip-offs:

1\. If you read the original article, you'll see that the second designer
assured me in writing that their artwork was original (I had my doubts so I
asked).

2\. Most stock template's terms of use explicitly forbid using them as logos
(presumably to avoid legal issues).

3\. At no point in the process was any hint given that the logo would not be
original artwork. Here's the blurb from the logo designer's page:

> I will design a killer, high-quality, effective and custom-made logo for
> your website, company or business.

And I may be mistaken, but the word "logo" itself carries connotations of
uniqueness to me.

------
brenschluss
$5? At $50/hr that's about 6 minutes; at $30 an hour that's 10 minutes. Barely
enough time to load up a stock file, slap some text on it in Illustrator, make
some default gradients, and call it a day. And that's exactly what you get.

Cheap things are cheap because 1) they take very little materials/labor to
make, or 2) they cost a lot to make, but there's a lot of it and the cost is
spread over many duplicates.

In this case, you're getting the latter, obviously. And you get what you pay
for. I'd say, if you're the kind of person who thinks paying for a $5 logo or
$300 logo is good enough, you might as well learn Illustrator yourself and
whip something easy out, since it will satisfy your two constraints: 1) it's
cheap/free, and 2) it looks okay to you but not to anyone else, but that's
fine, because the $5 logo would have performed the same role anyways.

This is like asking: "What kind of branding do you get for $5?" "What kind of
a PR rep do you get for $5?" Etc, etc.

~~~
avalaunch
I'm pretty sure that any attempt by me to learn Illustrator and whip out a
logo will be neither cheap (as I value my time) nor look good (even to me). I
imagine that's the case for a lot of (most?) non designers.

------
SimianLogic2
This reminds me a lot of sound effects in video games. At the high end you can
hire a sound designer to do custom foley/SFX. For a small game, maybe $1-5k.
Midrange, you can hire a sound designer with extensive knowledge to pick
royalty-free sounds for you (maybe $250). On the cheap, you can browse through
SFX libraries yourself and pick out what you want and pay per-effect (maybe
$20-$50 worth). Ditto for music.

It's kind of a spectrum of "custom-for-you" to "off-the-shelf" AND a separate
spectrum of "no-effort" (picking) to "put-in-a-lot-of-time-and-effort" (doing
your own shopping).

None of these are "wrong" or "stealing" \-- in this analogy Fiverr isn't even
the "cheapest" option (the author could put in some time and browse royalty-
free templates on their own). It seems like more a sign of a mature market
with too much inventory than anything shady.

------
anishkothari
I have used the first designer's work and he did a pretty good job for the
grand sum of $5. I think he's a design student, so it's a pretty good gig for
him (especially because he lives in a low-cost country). I sent him a stock
image that I liked and he made a similar design. No complaints from me!

------
JabavuAdams
The larger issue here is that it's common and expected to have to trademark a
logo, so if you're ever going to need to do that a logo made with stock art
may be problematic.

Other than that I'm a big believer in asset stores, stock art, etc. Especially
for prototyping.

------
ilaksh
So the actual logo for his site is the word "Folyo" in a circle.
[http://assets1.folyo.me/assets/logo-
white-41e8dee74424daa460...](http://assets1.folyo.me/assets/logo-
white-41e8dee74424daa4600dbbe8f1222a56.png)

Is this an original design?

If I spent $20 on Fiverr could I find a designer who could go on 123rf.com or
another stock site, get a vector image, adapt it, and make a better logo that
would be a less typical design?

How much did he actually pay for that logo? I assume it was quite a lot, given
the context.

~~~
vonklaus
That logo is a vector circle with 5 characters in it. You are right. Bit
ironic to decry unoriginal logo design, i would expect better for 20 into a
fiverr account

------
mproud
Reminds me of “The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment”
([http://www.logodesignlove.com/the-50-dollar-logo-
experiment](http://www.logodesignlove.com/the-50-dollar-logo-experiment)).
Sometimes $50 isn’t worth it either.

------
auxbuss
I used this guy a year and a half ago:
[http://www.vonglitschka.com/5MinuteLogo/index.html](http://www.vonglitschka.com/5MinuteLogo/index.html)

Loved the result. 5 USD for that kind of talent. Unbelievable.

------
chillingeffect
A cool article because after starting the experiment, it points out low-grade
thieves are incentivized to rip-off other's work.

~~~
newaccountfool
No one is stealing here, they are using template...

------
recalibrator
I used Fiverr to design logos for most of the "future-proof" business ideas at
StartJumper: [http://startjumper.com](http://startjumper.com) (a side project
of mine).

There are three that were "professionally" designed and not by Fiverr. Can you
tell which ones?

~~~
icushman
"Logical Lodge", "Solar PV", and "Pet Friendly Florist" are the only ones that
seem to have been built with any attention to modern design principles.
"Foresight Strategist" is ambiguous, in that someone could have thought they
were making a good logo while producing it.

The remainder would look entirely out of place in anyone's portfolio. I
certainly can't say with confidence that $5 is a bad price for those images,
but I can say that $500 would be.

~~~
recalibrator
The three are: Pet Florist, Privacy Enforcer and the StartJumper logo (so it
was a bit of a trick question).

Good answers by the way. I probably would have guessed the same.

~~~
icushman
Haha, thanks for the closure, that's interesting to know.

