
Ask HN: How much did you pay for your brand identity? - jiavascriptr
Aside from the ones that hacked somethinf together themselves: how much did you pay? What did you get? Was it worth it?
======
futhey
Just an FYI to other commenters, Branding/Identity is design work (not just a
name or domain name), typically resulting in versatile logo work, writing
style guides, a tagline, typefaces, colors, visual language development,
business cards, comprehensive print collateral, and a set of branding style
guidelines.

The foundations should exist so that you can easily develop this into an
application or web style guide as well, and make 90% of your future design
decisions from this foundational work.

The typical team (in the US) would charge about $15,000 – $100,000 (depending
on the size of the client and scope of work). You're getting 1 person for a
few weeks @ $15k, and a small team for 3-6 months on the high end.

You're not really paying for the individual pieces here. What you're really
paying for is a lot of research, experimentation, development, and refinement.
When you pay $100,000 for a world-class brand/identity, 90% of what you're
really paying for is for very talented people to try things, fail, and discard
them for something much better.

Funded startups with customers & product-market fit tend to go to the
$25k-$50k range. That's not going to get you world-class, but it's going to
get you "polished & consistent". You might do this again post- Series-A.

If you don't yet have customers (to research and understand), or product-
market fit, invest much less. If you have these things, investing in branding
will accelerate your marketing, and reduce the cost of future design. It's
definitely worth it, and you're going to pay to have it done eventually,
whether you explicitly hire someone to do it, or you let your designers
frustratingly "figure it out" as they go.

Not establishing branding and identity work early is like allowing your
programmers, as you hire them, to each make their own decisions as to what
technologies they want to use. You wouldn't seriously invest in developing a
large application without architecting it, and you don't design a large
application without foundational branding and identity work to support that.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

~~~
double0jimb0
Meh. You provide a great strategy for keeping professional branding people and
agencies in business, but not for growing the product company's sales. You are
just confusing people.

$100k invested into improving the product offering to better solve problems
for the customer WILL "accelerate your marketing".

~~~
jacquesm
God forbid other talented professionals charge rates compared to the value
they bring to the table. Just imagine!

Better marketing beats better products most of the time so it's hardly wasted
money and in fact may be a _better_ way to spend some of your start-ups $ than
to spend it just on development.

~~~
double0jimb0
Stop the presses! My apologies, I thought we were talking about product
companies actually making money, not "talented professionals getting paid
their 'value'".

The original comment was about "branding", not marketing, as you appear to
have misread.

And don't worry, I understand completely well how many talented professionals
actually make money. You are illustrating the point nicely.

~~~
jacquesm
Branding (and Brand Management) is an important part of a marketing strategy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_management)

And will - when applied properly - definitely help promote the company's sales
(contrary to your original comment).

------
emmett
The first version of the Twitch brand, space-themed, was created by Jacob
Woodsey (our only designer at the time and now owner of all social features at
Twitch), in approximately 4 hours spread over the course of a single day. So
probably equivalent to $1500 to get a high quality designer for a single day.

For the second version of the Twitch brand (Purple!), one year out and post-
series-B: we had 3 designers on the Twitch brand, not quite full-time, for
about 6-8 weeks. Plus a lot of Jacob's time. I'd estimate the total cost
around $50-$100k to hire a high end design firm to do the same work.

In both cases, it was the right level of investment for Twitch at the time.
Something quick and dirty to get us going in the first year, and something
with some depth and quality once we had enough momentum to commit to a brand
direction.

~~~
animal531
Great info.

But what would you say was the drive that made you decide to go from Step A to
B?

I guess I'm asking for tips (ignoring finances for the moment) as to when
business/design wise you need to be looking at a larger and more involved
option? Did the old design grow stale? Were you running into more real world
use cases where you needed design elements that were missing originally? Or
had the original just included more and more elements over time until it no
longer seemed consistent?

~~~
emmett
The first design was expedient: we needed _something_ in order to launch the
website. So we did a really minimal amount of work. It was never great --
nothing done in four hours can be great -- but it sufficed to be able to
launch a product.

After about a year, we had clear product momentum, so it was worth investing
in a better brand design since we understood our direction and customers at
that point well enough to do a good job that we wouldn't have to change later.

------
overcast
$500 for [https://kidisms.com](https://kidisms.com) pricey, but I wanted it
for a cute family, and friends side project, and that was less than half of
what they started asking. That was all there was to it.

Edit: If any you decide to you use it, and are concerned about archiving of
your kid quotes, I'll be adding an export button, so you can dump to JSON
easily.

~~~
dougmccune
Off topic: I had the exact same idea for a site, except a darker version. It
was going to be thisfuckingkid.com and would be a collection of quotes, just
like your site, but that all had to start with "This fucking kid...". I nearly
registered the domain at 3am after a few sleepless hours of bouncing on an
exercise ball trying to soothe my daughter when she rewarded/tested my
patience by biting me instead of falling asleep.

~~~
overcast
lol, yeh I have about ten different kid quote related domains at this point. I
settled on this innocuous one, for now :D

------
GFischer
We paid a local designer ( Alexis,
[http://www.retrieverfamily.com/#/](http://www.retrieverfamily.com/#/) ) for
our brand identity at [https://keveo.tv/en/](https://keveo.tv/en/) (we were
cheap and didn't pay him for the website, so he's not to blame), about U$ 500
but that's after he gave us a discount.

He worked iteratively, first going through some concepts, then based on our
feedback worked and delivered several logo concepts, and a brand identity
manual, several versions of the logo (for use in mobile devices, inverted
versions, etc...), as well as fonts and a brand manual with.

\- Basic logo use

\- Typography

\- Security area and sizes

\- Color palette

\- Best practices - using the logo correctly and incorrect uses

------
srvlsct
I had an idea for a survival/outdoor/science themed website years ago.
Brainstormed some names, found something available and bought
[http://www.survivalscout.com](http://www.survivalscout.com) for $13 (and
[http://www.srvlsct.com](http://www.srvlsct.com) for another $13). Worth it so
far.

~~~
avenoir
Awesome resource. Thanks for sharing your work!

------
Mz
Not trying to be a jerk here, but: Identity is not something you purchase.
Logos and all that are intended to communicate your identity, but your
identity is who you are as a company and you cannot really buy that. (If you
buy that, what are you? A puppet? A charlatan? I don't know.)

I worked for Aflac for over five years. That was an interesting experience and
informs my view of this. I got a lot of insider info on how the company was
established, created value, found ways to get market advantages and so forth.
I also learned a fair amount of backstory behind their branding with the Aflac
duck, the decision making process involved in that and so forth.

So, while designers and what not can play an important role in packaging your
identity (aka "branding"), be careful with thinking about this as "buying your
identity." That idea might go bad places and that might be part of why some
folks here are kind of shooting down the idea of hiring designers and what
not. If there isn't really anything to package, a beautiful package doesn't
really do much for your business. First, you need a real product or service to
offer. After that, you can add great packaging to enhance sales and mindshare
and all that.

~~~
paulcole
> Not trying to be a jerk here, but: Identity is not something you purchase.

Brand Identity is definitely a defined service offering that is sold by
individuals and agencies.

~~~
danielhooper
You can pay for a stylist to buy your clothes or cut your hair, but it won't
change whether or not you are a fashionable person. That's you and your
personality and you can't pay for a service to change that. The same is being
said of businesses with no substance in which to create identity out of.

~~~
Mz
Thank you.

------
hiharryhere
This is really topical for me as I'm looking for answers to this question too.

As someone in early bootstrapping stages, I want to develop some basic
branding (colours, logo, sample applications etc) but I need to be realistic
about budget. I'm happy to pay market rate and reduce the scope of what I'm
after to to make it affordable.

Does anyone have experience striking the right balance of cost and quality?

~~~
michaelbuddy
shop around locally, really investigate with phone calls what you can expect
roughly.

I would also help to create an RFP, request for proposal or request for
estimate so you outline what you are looking for, what you have, and then see
if various contacts bite at all and give a proper estimate or itemization.

You can get a lot of ideas quickly from using the 99 designs type sites.
Basically logo farms kind of pull stuff from their reserves and some of them
might stick. You'll get plenty of garbage but I doubt you'll say it' was a
waste because you'll probably get some great baseline ideas to work from. It's
really affordable, though admittedly a bit exploitative. Still it's those
group's choices that they want to participate / submit so it's not like you're
forcing them to submit. Find a way to pay out so not to be too exploitative,
hows that.

------
skdotdan
Not exactly what you are asking, but I found a great name/brand that sounds
like if it had to be the name of a big corporation. Strangely enough, the .com
is registered but not used, and there are no companies using that name.

I tried to contact the owner, but I can't because of Whois privacy.

~~~
cryptarch
You can!

The anonimized email address must work by ICANN rules, so if it isn't there or
working you can report the domain for faulty/incomplete whois data. I suppose
reporting to the registrar first would be courteous, or you can go to ICANN
directly:

[https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...](https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/whois/inaccuracy-
form)

"If the registrant knowingly provides inaccurate information, fails to update
information within seven days of any change, or does not respond within 15
days to an inquiry about accuracy, the domain name may be suspended or
cancelled."

[https://whois.icann.org/en/primer#field-
section-3](https://whois.icann.org/en/primer#field-section-3)

~~~
skdotdan
I just tried to send an email to the "Registrant Mail" and...

 __* ATTENTION __*

This email is being returned to you because the remote server would not or
could not accept the message. The registeredsite servers are just reporting to
you what happened and are not the source of the problem.

The address which was undeliverable is in the section labeled: "\----- The
following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----".

The reason your mail is being returned to you is in the section labeled:
"\----- Transcript of Session Follows -----".

This section describes the specific reason your e-mail could not be delivered.

Please direct further questions regarding this message to your e-mail
administrator.

~~~
geofft
Registrants are required to have a working contact address and reply to, at
least, communications from their own registrar in a timely fashion. They don't
have to reply to everyone from the general public, but if you got a bounce,
that's a good sign the email address is legit dead.

You can file a complaint at

[https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...](https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/whois/inaccuracy-
form)

and ICANN will follow up with the registrar, who will follow up with the
registrant or cancel the registration. I'm pretty sure this is exactly the
intended use: a domain squatter can't register a name and disappear
completely.

