I woke up today to the fantastic write up by Sacha Greif What Kind of Logo Do You Get for $5?, an epic tale of deception, stolen artwork, and crappy logos, which is a condensed version/follow-up of "The $5 Logo."
There was a time, when I too was shopping for something on a tight budget — and in all honesty, I probably would have been better off making my own logo; however, I was up to my eye-balls in client work and simply was unable to make time. It's just $5, right?
Wrong. I fell for the $200/- option where you get "everything", including all the stationary. Sounds amazing! Of course, that was the only option that also provided source Illustrator *.ai files. Blurry PNG/JPGs wasn't going to cut it.
I spent a lot of time giving the designer a long background on what I was looking for - I went as far as providing a long list of logos and logotypes, highlighting aspects from each that I liked, and stressing what it is I wanted my logo to convey.
If you squint really hard, this was basically a rip-off the buffer logo. Just that it only took about 2 minutes less to make in Illustrator.
Even though I was still smarting from being "ripped off", at least I now had a logo and it didn't take me away from my client work to get it done.
Enter "Maestro", stage left.
I've been lucky enough to professionally work with Adam for almost a year, and since then he's also invited me to be a part of the Grilled Pixels team.
We had a couple chats on Slack, and I also gave him a similar sort of background to what I was looking for. This process, of course, was far more iterative with close collaboration.
He has detailed his creative process behind the icon on Dribble
Along with branding of stationary
During this process, I have learnt a great deal from him, especially insight into how he approaches great design. But it's not just good design with Adam; he has a certain je ne sais quoi and flare that I can only attribute to his talent, keen eye, and great taste in colour palettes, and panache on choosing the most perfect font.
His partner Leanne is a fantastic copywriter and she has helped in providing some absolutely inspired slogans and tag lines. I absolutely look forward to working with them on some exciting projects soon.
The end result speaks for itself.