Custom logo from The Logo Company

January 30, 2006

I have wanted to personalize this site for a long time with some graphics and/or colors that are unique to me and this site. Unfortunately, my graphics ability is limited to cropping, resizing, opacity and some cool border effects!. None of those do much to help you from being accused of plagiarism. Even if you do flip AND rotate the image! On top of that, the best I could do for color was to leverage existing color schemes that I had found on other sites.

I really thought I was onto something when I whipped out some ebay templates with graphics in the headers. I could pick some representative image and work it into my header and I would finally have the a site that truly represented me. Or maybe not. They weren’t my pictures and I didn’t want to have my kids plastered on the site, so I was stuck again.

A couple months ago, the desire to have my own identity for this site was getting pretty strong. I was vaguely aware of online services that offer custom logo design but I was concerned about the price (I assumed it was hundreds of dollars) and skeptical of quality. A quick Google search turned up lots of options for custom logo design. My concerns about price were warranted because the sites I was looking at started at $300 for a custom logo. Their sample galleries looked nice, but there was no way I could justify that price. I was able to find cheaper options, but there were plenty of warnings on various forums about not going down the discount logo route for a variety of reasons. Summed up best with “You get what you pay for.”

I was about to give up the thought of having my own logo when I noticed a small blurb on one site1 touting that they had finished 2nd in a recent Wired magazine test of online logo design firms. Of course, that immediately prompted the question: I wonder who was #1? A little digging turned up the actual Wired article (not much of an article really; this review is already longer).

The highest rated site was The Logo Company. According to the review, you could get a logo for $75. However, on their site, their $75 package was now $99 due to the increased traffic from Wired. To compensate though, they were offering unlimited revisions. With it being under $100 and offering unlimited revisions, there really wasn’t much too lose.

So I signed up. The actual sign-up process involved answering a number of questions related your site/product and any preferences or info that you could give them to get them started. In retrospect, I understand that you aren’t really supposed to give the creative people too much information lest you pollute their creative process. I didn’t know that before I filled out the form and the Please state your creative strategy field was filled with a long rambling description of this site, the family etymology behind the name, the current slang derivatives, and Dreamy Smurf (aka Astro Smurf). See the About page for more info (yes, as of the date of this post, there is no additional info there to help demystify the origins of the name for this site, but this just builds up the suspense for you and pressure for me to finish it).

Wow! This is long. And I haven’t even gotten to the logos or my experience yet!

Note: I’m only going to mention turn-around times here and the reason for that is that I had no deadlines or immediate need for the logo. I specified up front that there was no rush on my part. If anything, they were probably annoyed at my turnaround times since it was around the Christmas holidays (not that I think they were sitting around saying “I sure wish Matt would get back to us on those SwoofWare proofs. I just can’t sleep knowing it isn’t done.”). I dragged the whole thing out for a month and a half. With that said, everything pretty much turned around in 3-4 days once I got it to them.

Initial Designs
I was pleasantly surprised with the results of the initial designs. I ended up with seven different proofs. It was pretty apparent that a couple of the designs were done by the same artist. Even more apparent was the blatant clipart (OK, maybe not clipart, but pretty bad nonetheless) attempt that everyone warns you about. See if you can spot it.

Design 1Design 2Design 3Design 4Design 5Design 6Design 7

What’s interesting to me is that I was very specific in stating that I wanted something iconic/symbolic that was clean and simple. Something along the lines of any of the following logos:
.

I specifically said that while it might be fun to try to incorporate the Smurfy definition of Swoofs, I didn’t want that. Somebody didn’t listen. And I thank them for that. While I liked the clean looks of the other logos, there was something about the little swoof-like guys I liked. My kids liked it best too, so that made it a little easier. So, thanks to whichever designer took a chance and went with the three characters (Of course, they might just have not read all the way through my initial request).

1st Revision
As much as I liked the caricatures, I really didn’t like the colors or fonts. In addition, I wanted to see about getting a little blue incorporated into the background circle behind the swoofs (ala Basecamp):

Design 4, Revision 1aDesign 4, Revision 1bDesign 4, Revision 1cDesign 4, Revision 1d

In addition to the colors and font change, I requested that the line through the characters be removed. But even more subtle than that, the artist change the position of the hands. They went from flared out to kind of extended along the body. I liked that much better and made sure to point that out as a keeper.

2nd Revision
Once I saw the blue background in the circle, I decided I didn’t like it and that there was enough blue from the characters in that area. In addition, I saw the green gradient in the bottom of the circle as a potential issue (you know, for when I get famous and need t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, etc.) and just wanted to go solid all the way around.

Design 4, Revision 2aDesign 4, Revision 2b

I thought we would be pretty much done by the time I got these proofs back. However, the artist threw in one last little change to tempt me with. All along, I had been wondering about the middle guy only having one eye. It bugged me at first and I wanted to stick with the artist’s original idea of only having one eye so I never mentioned it. And for good reason. While I wanted to see what it looked like, I really didn’t want to have to make the choice between the two. The logical part of me says that if the left and right guys are facing out and only show one eye, then the middle guy has to show two. The other part told me to go with the creative instincts of the artist and not to worry about the one-eyed guy in the middle. So that’s what I did. Of course it took me two weeks to finally decide that way (granted, I got sidetracked by Christmas and New Years during that process).

3rd Revision
We should have been through by this point. I was happy with the colors, the background circle and the one eye vs. two eyes dilemma. However, all through the previous iterations, I was nit-picking various alignment issues. I was hopeful that they would have caught on and double-checked everything for this version, but there were some things that I thought were 1-2 pixels off.

Design 4, Revision 3a

So I sent it back for one more round of touch-ups.

4th Revision
Which brought me to the final revision for my approval.

Design 4, Revision 4a

I had no changes at this point, so I gave them the OK to wrap up the files and send it to me.

Final
Here is a higher-quality image of the final version:

Deliverables
The zip file that I received with my final version contained the following:

1 x High Resolution Tif 300dpi(CMYK color) for just about any off-line
professional printing.

1 x JPG in grayscale for trademark registration if required.

3 x JPG in RGB color x 3 sizes (Normal, medium and small)for home/office
printing or web design work.

1 x vector based eps file which is your master editable file for professional
printing and professional design work.

1 x Transparent PSD for professional web design work.

Summary
Would I do this again? Yes! I think I got quite the nice little logo for $99 for my site. My only complaint about the process is that it felt a little like a black box: I submitted inputs and they spit out outputs. Which is the way you have to do it at that price. The thing that I missed was hearing the reasoning behind some of the artist’s choices (stick with one eye because…) and there really was no validation of my ideas to say whether they were good or not (although by providing subtle changes to provide guidance helped). This is what Ian Landsman got when he worked with a designer for his new logos for UserScape. I don’t have the money or need to put that much into my logo for this site thought.

The most important thing that I would mention is that you should try to find a deal that offers unlimited revisions for the price. In researching this article, I found one site that offered a logo with one revision for $69. I would not have been as happy with this logo if it had only had one revision.

Hope someone gets some benefit out of this article. Let me know if anyone actually makes it to the end! I was going to introduce the new logo at the same time as a new site design, but that might not happen for a little while. Hopefully I’ll have time after I get recurrence exceptions implemented for MyHomePoint.

1. Even though I didn’t go with the The Logo Loft, one thing that I thought was a nice touch was including an About page with real pictures of their location and employees. And even including all of the artist’s email addresses. With many services out there (including The Logo Company) you really don’t know how they are farming the work out.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

Comments

4 Responses to “Custom logo from The Logo Company”

  1. SwoofWare » ISAPI_Rewrite Rules for WordPress on IIS on January 31st, 2006 12:04 am

    […] How’s that for a short post to make up for the previous book I just wrote? Hope it helps. I don’t guarantee it is complete, but it seems to be working pretty well. Drop a note in the comments if I’m missing anything. […]

  2. Art Lover on February 21st, 2006 6:11 pm

    It’s weird and wonderful. Congrats on being brave enough to stand out from the crowd and please your kids at the same time, nice work!

  3. John Doe on June 18th, 2007 3:34 pm

    Be very, very glad that you didn’t go with the LogoLoft! They are a bunch of crooks that refuse to deliver any logo designs or issue a refund. You can read all about it at The Logo Loft Sucks! .

    Your design looks great and I will give that company a shot.

  4. SwoofWare » Blog Archive » New host, new theme, new links on August 4th, 2007 11:50 am

    […] my last make-over, I had attempted to incorporate the YUI Reset and Grids CSS along with my logo and my own custom design. Needless to say, if you have visited the site in the past year or so, you […]

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