Why does a quality logo cost so much?

A lot happens.

Some people stagger when I tell them a logo can cost thousands of dollars. Well, none of mine have, but my starting price is sometimes still a bit much for a thrifty business owner to swallow. Other times they don’t understand the process of custom logo design. Here’s why good designers don’t often trade a creative logo for a Thanks-And-A-Handshake.

There’s homework involved.

After the consultation but before I ever even touch a pen, mouse, or tablet, I do my research. I look for things that can tell your story: online, books, nature, engineering, art, photography, user experiences, and everything in between.

Then I brainstorm. I identify strong concepts and try to figure out what icons, images, or typographical tricks can condense the mission, objective, and culture of an entire business down into a single icon. Then I make sure no one else has already done it. That’s like trying to stuff 100 pounds of you-know-what into a 1-pound bag.

The effort is collaborative.

I’m not the only one with homework. In my consultations, I ask a lot of hard questions: questions many business owners may not have considered even when they wrote their business plans. I want to be sure I understand the essence of a business, what makes it different, special, or unique–and often it’s not the business’s product or service. It’s tapping into someone else’s inspiration. You may think we’re just having a conversation, but my consultation is a multi-sensory experience I’ve crafted so we can have a real conversation. For a brief moment, I share the client’s vulnerability as he or she talks about their dreams, goals, and fears (that’s my Clinical Psychology degree at work).

Sometimes, though, a potential client wants a logo, any logo, just to have a logo and doesn’t want anything to do with the process. While understandable, that’s not a challenge. That’s not what I provide. We should both come out of this experience with a better understanding of the business and each other so that we can both serve it better.

The software doesn’t do the work.

After the consultation and the research, there’s more work to be done. For my logos, personally, I like to start with good ol’ fashioned pencil and paper. It gets my creative juices flowing, bridges a connection between head and my hands, and frankly, I simply like the experience of soft graphite crushing into textured paper. I will go through 30, 40, or even 50 doodles over the course of a few days or a week until I hit on one that resonates. You just know it when you see it.

Though I sketch out many, many ideas, I revise, reiterate, and/or trash most of them. The research, brainstorming, and conceptualizing makes up the bulk of the cost of the logo. The actual time in the software is much shorter than any single previous step.

 

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The KISS Principle

Simple logos are not necessarily easy logos. Coco Chanel’s fashion advice relates to design as well: Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off. The Three H Medical and PhotoBuzz logos, for example, went though countless iterations to make them look deceptively simple. I filled several 11×15-inch pages with drawings, sketches, doodles, ideas, and words only to reduce them all back down to one idea. But once I saw it, I knew it was the one.

Presentation isn’t just for food

Once I’ve settled on two or three potential logos, I have to–as they say in Math class, “show your work.” I briefly explain the concept and what drove the design. If you don’t connect with a logo, no one else will either.

All of these steps take time, skill, and careful consideration to interpret a client and business. Sure, you can pay a sweatshop to bang out just any logo that you can slap into your e-mail signature–and they may very well have tried their best to interpret your goals. There’s a time and a place for that kind of work. But when purchasing a service that produces a product which is supposed to connect, resonate, and inspire, you’ll want to have that experience first hand as well.

Header Illustration by Adam Ellis

Some Web Hosts Just Aren’t That Good

“Web Host? A What?”

First things first, if you are already familiar with what web hosting is, you can skip this section. For those who are not internet-savvy, a web host is a company with lots and lots of computers who allows you to lease space on those computers to store the data for your website. It is the computers where your text, images, and dancing bananas GIFs () are stored for your domain name (www.mysite.com) . Hosting is something you must purchase in addition to your domain name if you want to be found on the web (unless, of course, you keep a server handy in a broom closet).

Oh, ok. So They’re not all the same?

Heavens, no. Of course, you can pick any one you want, from the cheapest you can find to the most robust supercomputers that could plan and power a fully automated trip to poor, old, evicted Pluto. The problem in taking a random shot with any old cheap web host is that their servers are unlikely be powerful or modern enough to fuel a professional website. They could be slow, unreliable, outdated, poorly supported, or neglected.

What’s wrong some of them?

Well, we all like a good deal. But when it comes to many things, you get what you pay for. The reason some of these hosting sites are super-cheap (like, $1 a month) is because they skimp on important features, like the storage space you receive, the number of visitors you can get each month, the level of technical support you’ll receive if your site goes down, or, in the case of Yahoo Small Business Hosting, outdated server protocols.

Case Study: Yahoo Small Business Hosting

Cover your eyes, it’s about to get very nerdy in here.

We ran into an issue with launching a website on a very basic Luminate/Yahoo Aabaco Small Business’s hosting service. The .htaccess file is a very normal and common part of a website; this is not some voodoo file that casts spells on visitors. Yahoo doesn’t allow an .htaccess file to be uploaded (reputedly for “security reasons”), which can cause an issue when navigating around the complex website we built. The home page looked and worked fine, but if you clicked on any internal link on the homepage, you received an Error 404: File Not Found. The .htaccess file has a redirect functionality, which will resolve ugly and complicated URLs to tidy and easy-to-remember URLs. Without this file, we had to change our permalinks from Post Name to Custom Structure, appending /index.php/ after the root. All the pages in the site after the home page looked like this: www.mysite.com/index.php/my-page, instead of the preferable www.mysite.com/my-page.

Further, Yahoo’s hosting is slow to upgrade to the newer versions of PHP. This can cause an issue with certain features of a modern website, from contact forms to how the site actually renders and functions.

Okay, you can look now; the nerding is over.

Now, we’re not picking on Yahoo here. Cheap hosting is fine for personal sites: simple HTML sites that don’t do a whole lot or for sites that don’t have a whole lot of data (e.g.: mostly text, a few small photos or graphics, and no fancy animations or slideshows). Cheap-o hosting is not for professional sites.

Who should I pick, then?

Well, you can host through us when you purchase a web design package. We can walk you through the entire Getting-A-Website process and tell you why and how we’re doing everything. We offer hosting plans starting at $39/month. Hosting is fast, reliable, and you speak to an American when you call. This hosting is secure, and prevents downtime, SPAM, hacks, and costly data loss. Most importantly, it is robust enough to power a professional website with the allocated resources necessary.

And you won’t regret having a lightning-fast site with nearly 100% uptime, I promise.