That'll be a fiverr and jobs a goodun

What do you do if you need want some "brand identity"? Back in the day we've done a bit of design work in vector packages and...

What do you do if you need want some "brand identity"? Back in the day we've done a bit of design work in vector packages and the like but it's not really our core business and we'd be the first to say it's not our main competency either.

The problem is as we forge ahead into this new digital frontier with blogs, sites, Facebook, Google+ etc having banners, logos, idents all becomes really quite important. We know we write too much, people like pictures and our brains are good at playing picture association games and binding memories to images.

We're busy (you can tell by the "The Pipeline" posts) so it was time to put our money where our mouth is and reach out to our fellow creatives and get some identity.

If you dare to type in logo design in Google you'll probably get, like we did, a mere 417million results to trawl through. If we don't have time to design our own we definitely don't have time to review 417 million sites.

Yes, that really says 417 million results

The thing is it became apparent very quickly that there's actually 3 broad offerings out there:

Free logos, typically you type business name in, select sector and the site throws out some ideas. Great for really quick proof of concepts and maybe you will get lucky but it's a finite pool so you could easily end up with the same logo as someone else, there's limited customisation and really you need logos in at least two aspect ratios
Paid for logo design collectives. You select a basic package with the differentiation between the packages being how many designs you will get, pay some money up front (quite a bit it turns out) and wait. This is probably a great idea if you have absolutely no idea what you're after. The engagement process includes a step where you provide a detailed brief allowing the designers to work up some ideas for you. This can be a very expensive service - in the UK prices typically started at 180 and worked up from there
Paid for logo design where you select the designer of choice. This is where we meet fiverr a community website where creatives sell their "wares". This is great when you know what you want, or at least have a good idea. You can browse through the many vendors looking for those producing work that works for you...

This is how bokoshoko met Smork. We had a fairly clear idea of what we wanted:
Vintage/Retro type - seemed appropriate for our ethos and we do a lot of re-purposing, re-using
Rectangular design - for banners, vertical strips and potentially physical labelling
Circular design - for square aspect ratio demands such as profile pictures
Simple black and white or single colour

fiverr allows you to customise your design request (in fiverr parlance this is a gig) so you can add on things like fast design turnaround, multiple or unlimited reviews, colour, images etc. The designer of your choice then produces the work for your review.

Review "contact sheet"

Our only experience is with the aforementioned Smork but he's handled two gigs for us now and both have been delivered very quickly, met the brief absolutely and the design/review process has been an absolute pleasure. Without getting into the detail of cost we will say that Smork has produced a range of designs/colours very quickly that absolutely meet our brief and has done so way, way below the cost of any other alternatives we could have used in the paid for logo design market.