Are logos important? 

They can be, and I think they should be.

But most logos I see for small businesses seem to me to be missed opportunities. 

In this post I’ll describe how, in less than a week and at a fraction of the cost of logos I’ve bought in the past, I used 48hourslogo.com to get a logo that I really like.

What are logos and how are they used?

Logos are meant to help express an identity for a business. Because they can be very distinctive and memorable, they’re an important part of the branding process. They are symbols, icons, emblems, “stickers” to signal to readers, followers and customers that your business is special.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Unknown

Your logo is a kind of picture, and it’s worth the trouble to get it right.

Distinctive and memorable is what I wanted for my riscorick logo, and I wanted a friendly, accessible feel. My content here and on my YouTube channel is meant to be that — friendly, positive and accessible while also being instructional and motivational.

Could 48hourslogo.com give me what I wanted, fast and relatively inexpensively? The guys at Project24, of which I am a member, said yes.

But they also said logos weren’t that important.

What is 48hourslogo.com exactly?

I found 48hourslogo.com to be exactly what they promised: a quick, easy, inexpensive way to get a good logo and other design elements, using a crowdsourced “contest” approach involving dozens of designers from all over the world responding to my specific needs and preferences.

48hourslogo.com is just one of many sites that automate the process of putting your design project out to a worldwide list of designers who compete to earn the fee established for the winning design. Since 2009 this site has sold 48,558 logos.

The fees are not large, so designers tend to work fast. Many, if not all, are full-time freelancers. For them, sites like 48hourslogo.com are a volume game. They have to work fast and submit to as many “contests” as possible to increase their odds of winning a few. As a result, many submissions are very ordinary. But ordinary is in the eye of the beholder. And ordinary is often a missed opportunity.

My project took more than week instead of the 48 hours promised, but I wasn’t in a hurry. It took me some time to settle on the designs I liked the best and to work with the designers to refine them. Even after I selected a winner, I spent a few days tweaking his design to the point where it was finally acceptable.

I also spent more than the minimums. I’ll explain that in more detail as I outline the process.

In my first business, which I started in 1981, I spent very little time on the logo. I had limited creative resources. There was no 99Designs or Upwork or Fiverr or 48hourslogo to turn to for quick, inexpensive design work. I used a local one man shop, whose prices were many times higher than the design site services available today. And I got only a handful of options — maybe 3.

Eight years later when I “pivoted” the business and renamed it, I spent more time on creating the logo. By then the business included an in-house creative department, so I had lots of help and lots of options.

Today, I’m a “solopreneur” — one guy building a business. So I’m glad to have a resource like 48hourslogo.com, which produced over 80 entries to my logo design contest. Working with 48hourslogo.com made me feel like I had a creative department again. It’s a start, anyway.

What’s the Process for Working with 48hourslogo.com?

Like most crowdsourced contest design sites, 48hourslogo.com uses a 9 step process:

1. Set up an account.

2. Start a contest.

3. Prepare the brief.

4. Review submissions/give feedback.

5. Select finalists.

6. Refine the designs.

7. Select a winner.

8. Complete the design.

9. Finish the process/download the elements.

Setting up and account is easy.

You provide basic login information, including an email address. Your account is identified by a number, rather than a name. You won’t be asked for payment information until you launch your first contest. At that point you’ll be charged a $29 fee in addition to the charge for the contest.

Starting a contest is also easy.

You select the package you think works best for you — mainly a question of what you can or will afford to pay. The less expensive package will attract fewer designers; the more expensive packages will attract more. I didn’t find, however, that the estimated participation matched my own contest experience. Fewer designers participated than I expected. But that didn’t matter. I got lots of entries.

I also paid a slight upcharge to make my contest “guaranteed,” which meant I would definitely buy a design — someone would ultimately get paid. In my research I had come across blog posts by designers attacking sites like 48hourslogo as scams seducing designers into posting their work, only to have it “ripped off” by others, including clients who could screenshot the designs, and duplicate them. 

A guaranteed contest theoretically attracts more entries, since designers know their efforts have a better chance of yielding a return.

Preparing a good creative brief is critical.

For a logo the brief should be brief. It’s just a logo, after all. 

But, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.

Designers can’t read your mind. The creative brief guides the designer by explaining your brand personality. It describes how you want to be viewed by clients, customers, readers, or followers. Are you serious, authoritative, formal, official? Or are you more relaxed, casual, open, approachable? Are there logos you’ve especially admired? Is there a style that just feels right? Do you have specific ideas or images you’d like to incorporate? The 48hourslogo site allows you to upload samples, as well as describe your brand characteristics.

As an assist in your design thought process, the site also allows you to browse winning designs by industry category and winning designs by designer, which is a good way to refine your logo concept before writing your brief. You can even invite specific designers to participate in your contest.

Since my riscorick brand is personal — just me experimenting with business ideas and commenting on the experiments — I uploaded a portrait image of myself that I had been using on various social media profiles. I also pointed designers to the logo I use at RiSco Productions, the company that houses all the content creation my son and I do, originally formed to produce our feature film, The Last Late Night.

Had 48hourslogo.com been around when I had that RiSco productions logo designed, I would have saved thousands of dollars. Thousands!

Reviewing designs and giving feedback is fun.

Once you’ve submitted your creative brief, you will be surprised at how quickly designs start showing up on your project page. But you shouldn’t be. If the goal is to complete a contest in 48 hours, designers have to work fast. 

I think I had more than 40 designs within the first few hours. I realized immediately that, while I thought I had been clear in the brief that this logo was for a separate brand, riscorick, many designers thought I was looking for a new logo for RiSco Productions. But the problem wasn’t my brief so much as the designers’ tendency to “understand too fast.” I’m guessing they plan to spend about 15 minutes on a design, having done maybe hundreds in the past, and don’t always read the brief carefully.

Offering the RiSco Productions logo as a sample also caused many designers to submit designs that mimicked the RiSco Productions use of letters in a circle, or just the letter R repeated and arranged in different ways. Ordinary.

But a couple of designers understood the opportunity of the photo, and used a caricature approach, combined with a font that felt more casual and energetic. And they stuck with the black and red in the RiSco Productions logo. As soon as I saw these, I knew one of them would be the winner.

Be prepared for that. Be prepared to be surprised by something you didn’t expect, but instantly love. It’s the best thing about creative work — the surprises. And working with a crowdsourced service is a great way to get the surprises fast and inexpensively. Just remember to write a good brief.

One more thing. In working with the designers, you’ll find that they are sometimes unresponsive during some of your day. That’s because many of them are in Europe and Asia.

Selecting the finalists allows you to focus on the best designs.

Finally, based on which package you’ve bought, you’re required to select a finalist or 2 or 3. From then on, you work with just those designers to get their designs to a point where they meet your needs.

I found that only 2 designers had really captured my interest, so I selected only 2, although I was entitled to 3. I chose not to spend time fine-tuning a third design that was obviously not a winner. In fact, the winner was increasingly obvious to me, but I worked with 2 designs until my favorite was beyond any doubt.

Refining the designs won’t necessarily require major changes.

It’s not that you can’t request significant changes based on seeing something in another design that suggests an improvement in a finalist’s design. But chances are, if you saw something that significant, you would have selected that designer as a finalist.

The refinement process is more of a tweaking process. You’ll request changes, review the changes, and sometimes reject them, requesting something different. There’s nothing to gain by being shy about asking for multiple changes. 

At this point, designers respond rapidly. They can taste the prize. In my case, I couldn’t keep up with them. The combination of time zone differences and other demands on my attention caused my review process to stretch well beyond 48 hours.

Finally, you have to choose a winner.

That won’t be hard. By this point, you’ll have a clear favorite. I know I did. But the designer won’t necessarily know. He’ll still feel the pressure of the contest, especially since he knows he’s a finalist.

Choosing the winner doesn’t release the prize.

Completing the design will probably require more changes.

Selecting the winner is still not the end of the process.

Once you’re certain of the wining design, the designer will still work with you to tweak things until you’re happy. And he doesn’t get paid until you’re happy. I went back and forth a few times, and I noticed with my winning designer that his responsiveness lagged a bit, once he knew he was the winner. It wasn’t a big deal. I loved the design.

The final step is downloading the design files.

Once you’re satisfied with the logo, you download the files which include various versions of the logo. You’re supposed to get a Logo Package, which in my contest included:

  • High resolution JPG
  • Transparent PNG
  • Vectored PDF
  • Vector source file

And 6 brand documents:

  • Black & white logo
  • Design mock ups
  • Color palette/options
  • Logo layout/options
  • Iconography/Favicon
  • Brand guideline

As I write this, I’m not sure I got everything I was supposed to get, which is simply a function of me not paying attention and, I think, the designer being in a hurry.

I don’t remember getting all those brand documents. And I can’t find them.

Note to you: When you work with 48hourslogo.com, don’t be as careless as I was. Make sure you get everything you paid for.

So, that’s it. All done.

But wait…

How and where can you use your logo to best effect?

Remember, I said a logo is the picture that’s worth a thousand words in projecting the identity of your business. It’s the handy little sticker you can put wherever you want to be recognized at a glance. It’s the brand icon used to identify all your work.

I intend to put it everywhere.

But I realized that too late — that I needed more than just the logo. I needed an “identity package.”

Lucky me.

48hourslog will also provide a complete identity package,

including a business card layout, letterhead and envelope layout, social media displays — all kinds of things. 2 items are included in the package price, with each additional item costing $50. 

I anticipate a limited need for printed material, but business cards are pretty basic, although I haven’t handed one out for a couple of years. And it’s possible I might need to send an actual paper document from time to time. Aside from that, I wanted banner images for Facebook and YouTube, good profile images, and a brand guide. 

No need for a banner or a car/truck wrap.

I used the standard package this time, at $149, 

expecting 10 designs and the ability to pick 2 finalists. For $20 I upgraded my package to “featured” to attract more designers, which I think was a waste. I only had 6 designers participate. I bought 4 extra identity package options, bringing the total cost of the contest to $369.

After designating the contest parameters I hit “Save and Continue.” No creative brief necessary on this project. This is all pretty straight forward design work.

Then the payment screen came up, again giving me the option of PayPal, credit card or ApplePay. I used ApplePay. Quick and easy.

Once I hit pay, I was moved to a screen that summarized my contest and displayed a clock ticking against a 3-day contest.

Launching this contest took me about 10 minutes.

By the end of the 3-day open design period, I had 74 entires from only 6 designers. I had expected more designers, and I was disappointed that all designers didn’t submit a design for each of the requested elements.

But I got enough to work with. Nothing blew me away. They were all pretty normal. Nobody got outside the box. That’s ok for this one.

Then I had to choose 2 finalist designers to refine the designs I liked in order to pick a winner.

I chose the two designers I wanted to work with as finalists, and began giving feedback.

Within a few hours of selecting my two finalists, both sent several more designs — a total of 20 — although I hadn’t given any feedback or direction for revisions. Some of them were just re-submissions of what they’d already sent.

The selection process is awkward. 

You have to keep jumping around. It would be so much easier if, once you selected the finalists, all other submissions would be removed to a separate file. The finalists must know this. They re-submit their designs to be reviewed more easily, since designs are displayed in reverse order of their submission.

I quickly knew my choice for winner. His work was simpler. Cleaner. It felt like it had more impact. He was very prompt in making the changes I requested, even though he’s halfway across the world (I’m still not certain exactly where).

And I loved all my stuff. Couldn’t wait to install the Facebook (facebook.com/riscorick) and YouTube (riscorickTV) elements.

And the Favicon! Who knew about Favicons? Not I. Favicons are tiny icon images you can insert into your WordPress theme to show up next to your URL. Just another spot to make a visual brand impression. It’s small, so you’ll want to select a version that is most recognizable in such tiny form. Very cool.

My experience was not 100% delightful, but it was about 95% satisfactory. Since the process is very structured and automated and the designers are anonymous and physically distant, you feel like you’re working with a computer, or some kind of artificial intelligence. 

I think this is typical for these crowdsourced, contest creative sites. 99Designs felt the same way when I used them a few years ago.

I missed the human interaction in the creative process that I used to enjoy when I had my own creative department or when I worked with an agency. But I don’t miss the cost of those things.

For far less than $1000, I got a logo I really like and a complete package of branding elements to support my riscorick venture. And it took less than two weeks, total. Had I tried to and been more diligent, I could have gotten the same result from 48hourslogo in half the time and at half the cost. You really can get just the logo for less than $200.

In building any business, branding is essential and logos are important. 

Having a fast, inexpensive option like 48hourslogo.com is another reason that now is a wonderful time to start a business.