This is easily the most common design brief given in this country. It’s a designer’s nightmare. A total cliché.

People want to stress to the locals that they are local too, or they want people in other countries to be aware that they’re exotic. Either way, the unique shape of Australia is seen as a very useful visual shorthand by business owners and it’s hard to argue with them – except that it’s been overdone to buggery and surely there’s only so many ways you can do it and still be original. 

So yes I cringed. My mind wandered away and my interest level dropped as I wondered how best to frame the word “no” at them.

“Are you open to other ideas?” I asked diplomatically. “Maybe” they replied.

I had to admit it made perfect sense on every level in this case. The name of the company is “My Aussie Travel Guide” and they produce audio book travelogues for people driving around Australia. Like, what else would actually work anyway? 

Obviously all of this is a way to introduce my latest solution to this particular brief and yes, I’ll admit it, I’m pretty damned pleased with myself. Smug, even. Here it is:

The heavy emphasis on the word “My” was very much part of the brief. The product is aimed at people who don’t want to follow established routes or organised tours. They may not necessarily want to travel in a clockwise direction either but random doesn’t generally work in logo design.

I actually came up with a few ideas I really liked. The one chosen wasn’t even my favourite. This was:

But the client didn’t get that it represented “Audio”. Maybe nobody would. Oh well, I think the right one was chosen in the end but I still like it!

And just for the hell of it, here’s some others I did that were rejected. I particularly liked the Vegemite one but they didn’t even laugh.

In addition to the logo I designed their stationery, packaging, 64 page booklet, shopping cart website and even a promotional video!

They’ve started with one product covering “My Gibb River Road” and they’re off again working on the next one. I wish them the best of luck and look forward to working with them again on the next one when it’s ready for packaging and adding to the site.

All I need to find now is a client who wants a logo with a map of Australia made out of audio waves! Maybe a radio station? Hello?

It seemed to me that I could find more uses for my iPad than as a media controller or games platform. I should be able to create things on it! After a lot of research into the painting app options, I settled on Procreate. It really is am amazing app and, although I think I proved that I can use it as a creative tool, this isn’t necessarily something I want to offer as a service to clients. Sometimes things are just for fun.

This ‘painting’ of my cat, Kong, was made, on and off, over a period of about 4 months and I have NO idea how much I’d have to charge someone if they wanted me to do a Procreate painting for them. In fact, I wouldn’t even try, I’d use PhotoShop. But I’m really pleased with it so I thought I’d post it here anyway.

If you don’t recognise what this is an homage to, it’s this:

And if you still don’t know what it is, it’s from an episode of The Goodies called “Kitten Kong”, which is what my cat is named after.

Freelancer.com goes public – sharemarket launch values it at nearly $1 billion.

So I checked them out. Essentially it seems much the same as 99designs.com, which I’d signed up for earlier in the year and investigated as a possible source of income. It wasn’t, and the whole experience had left me disappointed, angry, insecure and afraid for the future of the design industry as a whole. So naturally I signed up and gave freelancer.com a go. Yes I know, I’m a glutton for punishment but I was bored and had nothing better to do. “I was young, I needed the money!”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with these types of site, the idea is that the client posts their job and designers battle it out. This can be a single task, such as a logo design with a set ‘prize’ of whatever they are willing to pay and designers submit designs, or ongoing work like creating 10 banner ads per week and people place a bid for the contract.

I didn’t place any bids on contracts. The rewards on offer worked out to a couple of dollars per hour – basically third world rates. Sod that.

One logo design job I saw was perfect to test out the process with minimal effort. A bookstore wanted a dragon with some gothic text and I have a dragon I’d designed for someone else years ago that never got used. It took me about 20 minutes to choose a font, type the company name, wrap it around my dragon and post it as an entry. Mine was the second one to appear, so someone else had taken even less time than I had!

The offered ‘prize’ was a whole $115. For a logo design. Really.

I received a private message from the client an hour later, “I think it’s great!” but could I face the dragon in the opposite direction. No problem, this took about 5 minutes. If this was just a normal client who’d come into my office and I’d presented this design he’d have accepted it and been happy, but now there were 20 other entries and 6 days left to run.

By the next day there were over 50 entries. In the comments section someone had singled out 3 that he said were stolen, with links to where they’d been stolen from. Mine was one of them. I followed his link and it looked nothing like mine, #2, at all. It was exactly the same as someone else’s though, #12, so I replied, pointed out his mistake and requested that he fix his typo. He didn’t, there’s no option to do so, and his published comment just sat there, wrongly branding me a cheat.

Yesterday I had another look and there were over 100 entries. The client had posted a comment, 3 days before the competition was supposed to end. “The winner will be the best variation on the logo in #92 combined with the font in #79. first one to display the best combination of those 2 elements gets the win.”

To which I publicly replied, “So the first person to plagiarise the work of 2 other designers gets to win? Even by the low standards of this type of site, that’s an appalling outcome.” My comment was deleted. The person who had created the preferred dragon changed the font and won. As always, everybody else gets nothing.

These sites are bad for the design industry and here’s why…

I’ll use a hypothetical case with nice round numbers to make the maths easy.

Let’s say a client wants a logo for $500.

Designers charge $100 per hour when dealing with direct clients, so that’s 5 hours worth of work.
501 designers submit designs.
One happy designer collects $500.
500 designers get nothing.

If each of them have also spent 5 hours on their work, that’s a total of 2,500 unpaid man-hours that have been thrown at this client’s job for free. That is $250,000 worth of work that nobody is getting paid for.

Look at the design industry as just that, an industry, and consider these figures. Could any industry sustain itself by providing over $250,000 worth of work for a mere $500 return? No. Is it reasonable for a client to expect 2,500 hours of work for $500? Of course not but that’s exactly what is happening.

Yeah sure, we’re not an organised industry, many of the people submitting designs aren’t even designers, but so what?

The issue is that these sites completely diminish the perceived value of what professional designers do.

There is, well there should be, a lot more to creating a design for a client than fulfilling a one paragraph brief. The solution is bound to be a bit generic and the best designs aren’t even winning. Many entries are stolen. Unfortunately most clients won’t care or wouldn’t know the difference and why wouldn’t they love the idea of having so much to choose from for so little cost?

Ideally, clients and designers alike will shun sites such as these. If designers cut off their source of well designed material they will become known for what they basically are, amateur design competitions, and genuine clients will continue to seek out real designers to achieve quality results and genuine service without contributing to a concept that has made the site owners very rich indeed off the backs of so many unpaid contributors.

I thought it might be interesting to explain a little about my process when designing a logo, using an example of one I recently completed for Vital Signs & Graphics.

Step 1 – talk to the client

This is a client who came to me through an ad I run on Gumtree. His name is Paul Maziakowski and he’s a nice bloke (and if you’d like to use his services, call him on 0422 619 814). I used him to do some business signage for another client before I started work on his logo so I met him, was able to witness him doing his job and we got to chat about his logo in person. This is ideal, sometimes I only communicate with clients through emails or on the phone, often they aren’t even in Australia so there’s no option to meet in person.

Paul specifically requested type only, no symbol, and blue.

I think I’m a pretty good judge of people and that’s something that helps a lot in trying to imagine what sort of look might appeal to them. Having dealt with signwriters over the years, I also had a few notions of my own about the profession. For instance, I know that they have been around forever as a trade and, despite the digital modernisation of their job, there’s a positive association with their history. So I decided to go in with something clean and modern to suit the person, as well as a few more retro concepts to suit the industry.

Step 2 – pick some fonts

Over the years I’ve accumulated a LOT of fonts, 6567 of them in fact. I love type. My design origins were rooted in typography and so, for me, everything else stems from that. 

The first thing I do is type the company name into my font application and scroll through all 6567 fonts, picking out the ones that work. It’s hard to explain how a font ‘works’ with a defined set of words, it’s not just a matter of me choosing fonts I like. Some fonts just look right for certain words and concepts. Ideas come to me as I go and after an hour or so I have a page like this:

Step 3 – Google Images

Not to steal ideas but it’s important to see what the client’s competitors are doing. It’s good to see how the more professional companies present themselves and also what horrors other designers have inflicted on the weak and uninformed. Sometimes this inspires me to go back to step 2 again with a new idea in mind, sometimes it’s just good for a giggle and to make me feel better about myself as a designer. I don’t do this before I search for fonts because I don’t want to cloud my own ideas before I even start.

Step 4 – do the first thing I thought of

This nearly always turns out to be the version the client chooses, by the way. As I’m looking through the fonts, something will jump out at me. As I’m looking through Google Images some little tweak may appeal and inspire something.

I look through my page of chosen ones and find the perfect font for what I have in mind. It might take me an hour or two, sometimes more, to achieve a result that pleases me. I may leave it, come back later after rendering the second concept, then maybe again after the third or fourth. Or I might get it spot on first time, like this one.

Step 5 – do more

Throughout the process I’ll have had several ideas and quite specific concepts I want to try out, so I do. Some are more slyle based, others process based. For instance, in the image below of the next 3 logos I came up with, the first was “something to do with billboards, big, solid, strong.” Plus I really like a 3D logo and sometimes clients agree with me so why not? The second was based on something I saw in my image search. The idea of cutting type in half, although what I’d seen was very different, had appealed to me. The third was completely to do with my respect for the longevity of the signwriting trade. I had a picture in my mind of an old signwriting business that’d been around since the 70’s and was trading on the old “Est 1974” concept that used to be so popular in logos. I wasn’t sure the client would get it but I thought it was a good idea so again, why not?

Step 6 – send them on

So now I package them up into a PDF, make sure I specifically mention that there are multiple versions on multiple pages (you have NO idea how often people don’t realise there’s more than one page) and hope for the best.

Pre-email technology, I would meet with clients and present the designs and discuss them. I would naturally try to convince them of the merit of an idea they might not have appreciated or understood at first glance. I never felt comfortable doing that though, I think if they don’t “get it” themselves then the idea probably isn’t as good or as clear as I thought. And if they don’t get it, their market probably won’t either. I’m happier with the new post-email arrangement, where they get to see the options without me influencing their decision.

In over 30 years of doing this I can only remember 2 times when the client hasn’t liked anything. In my career, 90% picked the first thing I did, 7% picked one of the others, 2% went back and forth unable to make any sort of decision and 1% was deliberately wasting my time, and theirs. 

That’s my process. I’m sure other designers may have quite different ones. I’d be interested to hear from you in the comments if you have any thoughts to add.

So give me a call and let’s start at Step 1!