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How Much to Pay for Logo Design Work

Your logo is the keystone of your business. It’s what clients and prospective clients remember, it’s the first step toward building a recognizable brand and it’s the only way to even the playing field with big businesses on the design front.

You probably can’t afford to shell out $1 million for a logo the way Business Insider reports Pepsi did in their 2008 rebrand, but you probably don’t want a throwaway $10 logo either. Or do you?

Logo Design Work

The thing about logos is that you don’t necessarily get a piece of equal value to the cash put into it, but rather a design worth as much time as you and your designer spent figuring it out.

Spending hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars on your logo won’t make a difference if you don’t understand a few key aspects of logo design first.

Color Theory

As stated by Creative Blog, the human mind responds well to visual stimuli, including light, shape and most notably color. Color theory varies from culture to culture, but when it comes to designing a logo there are a few points that really don’t change.

Colors, for instance, have inherent meaning:

  • Red indicates energy, passion and warmth. It stimulates the appetite, making it an excellent option for restaurants everywhere—as you’ve probably noticed—as well as being considered highly dynamic.
  • Yellow is rarely used alone in logos due to negative connotations including fear and warning. However, beyond the “yellow-bellied” history of this particular hue, yellow can also seem friendly, youthful and vivacious.
  • Blue is almost certainly the color seen most often in corporate design. This is because blue implies safety, stability and comfort; where red is passionate, blue is compassionate; where yellow can wake you up with warning, blue is a calming indication that everything is just fine.

When you’re ready to get your logo designed, make sure that you choose a designer who understands what colors mean and is prepared to offer a wide range of options to assign different feelings to your logo with the colors selected.

Services like Designhill make it easy to work with multiple designers at the same time; because these services let you set the price for the selected work, it’s a great place for small businesses and startups to turn when it’s time to build a brand.

If you’re not sure what color you want to work with or how much to pay for it, this can be a great place to turn. Check out other logo projects to get a good feel for what people pay and the kind of design you can expect.

Form and Function

While color is important, you already know that your logo isn’t just a splash of color or an iridescent scribble. The design of the logo itself is massively important to being memorable, recognizable and easily printed.

Mashable offers the following tips on making sure your logo design is closer to hot than not:

  • Create something you believe is different from anything else
  • Know the kind of image you want to portray
  • Make sure your company name can fit well into a logo to begin with
  • Be prepared to change it along the way
  • Trust your designer to put forth the image you need

There’s no one size fits all technique for choosing the logo design that will really sing for your business, but there are plenty of designers out there ready and able to get started. When you come to a designer, however, be prepared to tell them your full budget (not including funds for revisions) and share what your business is all about.

The Bottom Line

So how much should you spend on a logo? If you opt for a service and commission a logo design at Designhill or a similar company, it could range anywhere from $199 up to around $600, while you’ll find independent contractors ranging in bid from $5 to $5 thousand.

Finding a middle ground between the two, based on the complexity and detail of the final product, is simple enough if you start in the right place.

Make sure to go over your budget carefully before setting out to pick up a designer or start crowdsourcing. Also make sure that your offered price is a little bit below your full budget for the project, in order to have funds to cover late revisions and extra work from your designer.

Offering $50 to $100 less than your budget is acceptable, but for good logo design you don’t want to drop below at least $350.

Remember that starting too low only attracts designers working at the lowest rates, who tend to offer logos that aren’t quite up to par; if they’re getting paid a fraction of industry average, the designer you select will almost certainly end up producing your logo in a hurry, possibly leaving behind sloppy lines, obvious mistakes, and a contract clause stating that no revisions are allowed.

Aiming a little higher in price allows your project to draw in better designers, prepared to work longer and harder on your project, so that everyone involved can go home happy.