More from my monthly col­umn in form, the Ger­man design magazine.

Logos to go.

Who needs graphic design­ers when you can just get logos online for a few dollars?

At last there?s a col­league who does away with a myth: design­ing logos and other graphic ephemera is the begin­ning of an exten­sive process in which the com­pany first has to ‘find’ itself, before it, aided and abet­ted by management-, style-, adver­tis­ing and design-consultants, reaches the apex of Cor­po­rate Design: the logo.
I quote from a web site:

“We involve up to 5 graphic design­ers on your behalf in order to get as much vari­ety of designs as pos­si­ble. We now offer a new logo design, done by at least 3 dif­fer­ent graphic design­ers, for just 199 Euros.”

There you are: if 1 designer makes a bad logo, 5 design­ers can make 5 bad logos. One can hardly get a decent meal for that sort of money these days! But there’s more:

“This is a unique offer, well below the com­mon price struc­ture in this busi­ness of between 500 or even 2000 Euros.”

Wow! 2000 Euros? Wei­de­mann was rumoured to have been paid 200,000 old Marks for his DB-logo back then. That must have been one per­cent for the work, with the remain­der as dam­ages for count­less pre­sen­ta­tions, cor­rec­tions and re-submittals over the course of the two years, the usual time span these things take in a gov­ern­ment agency.

“Why are our prices so low? Our design­ers work from home. Our ser­vices are based on com­mu­ni­ca­tion via elec­tronic media between designer and client: e-mail, SMS, Chat, Inter­net. And our design­ers work in eco­nom­i­cally well-placed regions.”

So there. While they’re sit­ting at their com­put­ers all day chat­ting, they might as well do a few logos on the side. And obvi­ously these regions are in the East­ern bloc, where the Euro is hard cur­rency, soft­ware is quickly appro­pri­ated and intel­lec­tual prop­erty is val­ued about as high as the Russ­ian Rou­ble, but where every other per­son is a Grand Mas­ter in chess and ace pro­gram­mer. Go for it, all you clients who keep com­plain­ing about the high cost of labour. Here’s another ser­vice, apart from Call Cen­ters, which you can del­e­gate to peo­ple with­out much knowl­edge of Ger­man. It’ll save money and tire­some dis­cus­sions. And if you don’t like the results, sim­ply order another half dozen logos. That will keep 30 graphic design­ers busy and cre­ate jobs, albeit far away. We need to think global!