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!