Another vote for ‘Simplistic, crap, and easily created in about 10 minutes’. It’s no surprise that some clueless idiots at the AC wasted 70k on this crap. One of the golden rules of life is this: if you give someone the right to spend money they haven’t had to earn, there will be MASSIVE waste.
It is SO easy to other people’s money, tax money. Spending 70k on that logo is just obscene. Charging 70k for it is obscene and shameless.
All right, I guess it’s kind of simplistic, and not very inspired, but which logos merit the price add companies charge, anyway?
Maybe I’m just uneducated about the intricacies of a really good logo. Perhaps someone could provide some examples of logos that they consider worthy so I can compare.
I’m not being sarcastic, I would like to know in order to have better appreciation for good design.
Well, it’s not really matter of a particular logo meriting a particular price, but the size of the company hiring the ad agency and the prominence they plan to give the logo. As I said in my earlier post, one of the primary factors in determining cost is where the artwork or copy will be used. The corporate logo for a major company (or government agency) would probably command a fee similar to what was paid in this case, although the fact that it was a government group with little direct fiscal accountablity no doubt affected things.
Two things to remember about how most ad agencies work:
The price is agreed upon before the project is begun.
The project is not finished until the customer is satisfied (within reasonable (and contractually stipulated) limits).
That means that after looking at all the available designs, the UK Arts Council held up the circle design and said “ok, you can stop working. This is the one we want. We’re satisfied.” If the designers there are anything like the ones I work with, they probably looked at everything they’d come up with along the way and said “That’s the one they wanted?!?” and would probably feel more than a bit insulted.
Anyway, as I said before, I think they should have just held an open competition. It is the freakin’ Arts Council, after all!
Actually, £80.000 for re-branding is not bad. This type of work is normally not only a logo, but a complete work over of everything. Letterheads, fax-sheets, businesscards and what have you. I’ve done these sort of things, and regardless of the logo, there is a surprising amount of work to do all these things.
To put together an entire new graphic profile could cost that much, without the “artistic” work of designing the logo.
That said, the logo in and of it self could be done in 15 minutes.
The Gaspode has a point. My business added the “million dollar letter” to its name a few years back, went from a 3 letter acronym, to a 4 letter acronym, woo hoo! Everything had to be changed, signs, letterhead, web pages, business cards, contracts, the list went on and on.
The funniest part was that they wanted us to stop using the acronym altogether. Everyone, in every communication, (internal or not) was to now use a 41 letter, 15 syllable name instead of the old 3 letter acronym. Now THAT’s an efficient use of our time :rolleyes: