The Top Considerations When Designing a Logo for Your Business
- Your logo should be memorable so that your customers carry a visual memory of your company.
- Your logo should be simple in order to be easily remembered. You don’t have to go all minimalist, but a complex logo with a lot of different colors can be confusing. Stick to simple images or fonts that complement each other and keep the colors down to just two or three which blend together well.
- Your logo should be positive. Your logo is not just on your business card; it is the business card of your enterprise. So, look for a logo that presents your company in a good light and generates positive feelings. A gloomy logo will provoke negative responses in your potential customers.
- Your logo should express your company’s mood and personality. You might love the logo of Company X, but you need something that reflects what is unique about your company. No two logos should ever be too similar, to avoid confusion for your customers.
Types of Logo Design Service: Professional or DIY?
There are two primary ways to get your new logo: Professional or DIY. Professional logo design companies offer bespoke design with a dedicated designer or use competition among associated designers to come up with an original logo. DIY logo design involves a DIY logo-building site which lets you use their templates to develop your own logo.
DIY Logo Design
It’s likely to be less original, but cheaper and faster, to go DIY. You simply browse archives of images, layouts, and fonts and combine them with different backgrounds, adding your own text and changing the colors as much as you want. DIY logo sites are mostly free, although you’ll often be charged a small fee (under $50) to download the final high-resolution image files. The logo you’ll end up with won’t be totally original, and if you are not fully confident about what you’re looking for then you might find the choice and the lack of guidance to be quite daunting. However, if you want your logo fast (within 24 hours) and are quite creative, DIY logo makers might be a good solution.
Professional Logo Design Services
Professional logo design companies include those who invite associated designers to compete in creating a logo design and those which provide a bespoke service. Competition websites often offer more design options because of the number of designers involved. Somewhere like 99designs invites you to send in a brief outlining the logo you want, with the images and text to be included and samples of other logos that match your vision. The designers then submit designs for you to narrow down to about 3-5. You can then spend another few days editing and sending feedback to your 3-5 preferred designers until you choose the logo you want. This can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to around $1,000.
A fully bespoke logo design is the most expensive option, but it usually brings you the most originality and flexibility over your logo design. Different pricing packages offer different numbers of revisions and original design concepts (you can read more about understanding pricing plans below) from a few hundred dollars up to around $1,500
Top 4 Logo Design Companies
Wix.com
Overview
Leveraging the same platforms that made them a trusted name in website design, Wix offers DIY logo design services that produce creative, affordable logos in just minutes
Special Highlights
In just minutes, Wix analyzes your design preferences and learns your style type to produce smart, personalized logos.
Advantages
- Wix harnesses its experience as a well-established web-design platform used by millions, producing logos with the same ease and professionalism that have earned them their reputation.
- DIY logo creation in less than an hour.
- Free to experiment with. You can customize and tweak dozens of possible logos and even download a low-res sample for free
- Intuitive prompts “learn” your style preferences.
- Affordable design with options to upgrade or bundle together with website services.
DesignCrowd
Overview
Design Crowd is far more than just a logo design brand--it does everything from logos, brochures, to presentation materials and websites. Design Crowd has over 650,000 designers all over the world vying for a chance at your project, and you can take your pick from the database to find the designer you love. Prices range the gamut, so you’re sure to find something that works for you.
Advantages
- 24/7 customer support
- Customer satisfaction guarantee promises to refund your money if you aren’t completely satisfied
- Use it for any kind of design project
- Receive the first designs in as little as 24 hours
Looka
Overview
Looka’s software is AI powered, creating a logo for you that matches what you’re looking for without requiring any design skills. There are endless options, which you can tweak until you’re happy. Once you’ve designed the logo, download a social media kit, business card designs and more.
Special highlights
Looka Enterprise package offers a full branding experience, and you can pay after you’ve designed the logo you’re ready to stick with and love.
Advantages
- Super easy application
- Generate hundreds of options, and view them on mugs, t-shirts and more
- Get 15+ logo files in all standard file types
- Live chat and email customer service
Fiverr
Overview
Fiverr is a marketplace for designers and other freelance workers to provide fully designed logos often for very low prices. You can browse the portfolios and pricing offers of hundreds of designers before agreeing on price and terms with one designer and sending him or her your brief.
Special highlights
Some designers on Fiverr are very experienced, giving you direct access to top level designers for lower prices than if you went through a design company.
Advantages
- Customer support on the Fiverr site is excellent, with live chat and 24/7 accessibility. You can also contact your designer directly, although response time and availability is going to vary. It's preferable to check what time zone they're in if you want fast communication.
- You can choose your price, which means that if you have a clear idea of what you want and the logo won’t be too complicated you could get the whole thing done for under $10.
- Thousands upon thousands of sample logos means that you can get ideas and inspiration just from flipping through the portfolios on display. However, it can also be overwhelming for the indecisive, who might prefer the guidance of a bespoke or competition design setup.
How to Choose the Best Design Service for Your Small Business’ Logo
- Turnaround time. If you’re under pressure to roll out a new logo the next day, you might choose to use a DIY logo design site. On the other hand, enterprises that aren’t rushed can oversee a longer process of choosing designs and editing options with a bespoke design company or design competition site.
- Creative control. Companies that know exactly what they want might prefer either a DIY site or a bespoke design service where they can express their precise wishes one-on-one.
- Complexity of your design. A complicated and intricate logo is going to need a higher level of skill than a simple one. The more intricate your logo, the more you should expect to pay for a top level designer who knows how to create at that level of detail.
- Need for guidance. Enterprises that know what they want and how to express it can manage using a marketplace site like Fiverr or a competition site like Designhill. On both of those sites, you'll have to be able to convey what exactly you are looking for and, in the case of Fiverr, sift through a lot of logo samples which could be overwhelming to the indecisive. If you really don't know what kind of logo you want, choose somewhere that links you with a dedicated designer or account manager for more handholding.
- Price. If you’re on a tight budget, you might need to take advantage of the low cost of DIY sites. You could also look at a basic budget option on Fiverr or the most basic option on a competition site like 99designs. If money’s no object, though, you might prefer to use the more extensive services of a bespoke designer.
- Copyright and ownership. The company should give you full copyright and ownership over all image, vector and source files. This should be a no-brainer, but there are some less reputable companies which withhold copyright. If the company doesn’t declare in big letters that you get full ownership at the end of the process, be wary.
Pricing and Plans
As you'd expect, pricing can differ widely between different companies. We've brought some of the main plans from the top four logo designers together in this table to help you compare your options and make an informed choice.
- Pricing: Varies per freelance designer
- Designs: 25-100+ per project
- Revisions: Varies per freelance designer
- Guarantee: 100% satisfaction guarantee
- Pricing: $20=$80
- Designs: Endless designs
- Guarantee: Don't pay until your'e satisfied
- Fees: None but there are optional add-ons
- Pricing: $5-$20
- Designs: 1
- Revisions: Unlimited
- File type: JPG only
- Priority: Low
Always check how many revisions are included in the price. Competition design websites like Designhill and 99Designs offer unlimited revisions until you select the winning design.
Bespoke design companies like PnC state the number of revisions on each package. If you go over that number, you'll have to pay an extra fee, so if you’re going to need a lot of revisions, choose an unlimited option. Most of our top five recommendations guarantee your money back if you aren’t completely satisfied with your final design.
The pricing on Fiverr is a little more difficult to compare. Their setup is such that designers represent themselves on the Fiverr marketplace and can set their own pricing plans, terms, and conditions. Do read the small print, and contact the designer directly to clear up anything that you aren’t sure about. In order to include them in our pricing table, we’ve taken an average pricing option from around the bottom, middle, and top of the market.
Designing a new logo for your business is not an easy task, but hopefully, our advice and information has made the process clearer for you. Whichever approach you choose, we hope you'll end up with a logo you love!