Did you know that the average logo designer makes between $40,000 and $64,000 a year? In a world where online logo making software is available for nominal fees, this seems impossible. Yet strangely, logo design is still an incredibly profitable business.
Logo designers make their money through offering valuable, high-quality products that are essential to the modern brand. Though it’s possible to have a logo done cheaply, hiring a skilled and experienced designer will offer far more precision and a better end product, keeping the logo design industry profitable.
Here are the four things you need to know about the profitability of logo design.
1. Logo Design Is Important in Business Success
The logo is often one of the first things a potential customer sees of a brand. It’s plastered all over branded websites, social media pages and posts, and physical products like stationary. The purpose of a logo is to garner recognition and association with a brand – and that’s why it’s so important to have a good logo.
A well-designed and attractive logo can help create positive associations with a brand, offer a more cohesive brand narrative across platforms, and make a brand memorable to its target audience. This drives conversion in the long term, which can impact the company’s success.
On the opposite side of this, having a poorly designed logo can foster negative associations with a brand; they might be seen as unprofessional or amateur, or at worst, untrustworthy. This can make it difficult to drive conversion or build a brand that people care about, and can cost the company quite a lot of time and money to correct these assumptions.
Therefore, logo design is an extremely worthwhile investment for any business, and deserves to be charged as such. This is why the average cost for logo design is between $300 and $1300, with some projects being worth more than $2500.
2. Quality is King in Logo Design
The number of logos you create as a designer isn’t nearly as significant as the quality of the logos you create.
A good logo, well worth a high price tag, is going to be one which can be clearly interpreted on the smallest of screens; it should be instantly recognizable as a brand symbol (think the Nike swoosh or Amazon’s smile) but still simple. This isn’t easy to do. Designers are boiling an entire brand – a mission, products, company values, and more – down to one mark and, often, no more than two or three colors.
Because of this, designing a logo can be extremely difficult and take a significant amount of time. Having the required knowledge and experience in graphic design means that your work is of high value.
If you’re considering creating logos for clients, we highly recommend checking out the newer logo makers online. Our personal favorite is Placeit.net because it has the most logo templates, and gives you full commercial usage rights so you can sell the logos to clients. Further, they even allow you, or your clients, to trademark the logo made from their website! This makes the process a lot easier than starting from a blank canvas.
3. Know Your Customer’s Needs to Sell Your Logo
As a part of the design process for a logo, it’s vitally important to learn about the company for whom the logo is being designed. A logo is a snapshot of a brand, meant to evoke a particular emotion or reaction and stay in your mind long after you’ve seen it.
To design a good logo, you need to know:
- What does the company do?
- How do they create value for their customers?
- What does their current branding look like?
- What values are at the core of the company?
- How should a consumer view the company after seeing the logo?
From there, you can rely on the psychology of design to incorporate some or all of these themes into the logo design.
4. Going Beyond Logo Design
Most designers will do far more than simply design a logo. There is a whole process to its creation to take into account.
Designers will assess the brand’s marketing and identity, identify and work with their target audience, create multiple base sketches for their clients to review and select based on preference, refine the design through multiple rounds of revision, offer mock-ups of the design for final review, and then deliver a high-quality product that will be used for many years to come.
When brands are paying for a logo, they’re also paying for the entire process that goes into making it, and the hours of labor (as well as years of experience) being done by the designer.
Conclusion
Some companies may scrape by on an automatically generated logo for quite some time. Inevitably, though, they’re going to want something that speaks directly to them as a brand, and offers their customers an insight into the company they are investing in.
Logo designers know this, and, using their experience and these tips, can definitely still make a reasonable profit in the modern design industry.