Ask HN: How to get a Logo/ Corporate Designs in 2021?

I know this has been asked plenty times before but most of these threads seem to be quite old. So hear me out.

I am the founder of a cyber security startup in Germany and we are at a point where our website is getting more and more traffic and customers start to ask for business cards to refer our services to other businesses. Soon our web app with new services will launch and it just doesn't have any proper design guidelines yet. Currently the logo is just the name in Roboto font and all presentations and documents are just plain text without any proper corporate design.

I have been doing some research and it seems like there is three main contenders for crowd sourced logo designs:

- fiverr - 99designs - designcrowd

But HN seems to have a bad opinion about each of these platforms. Regarding the covid situation I'd also much rather pay a creative person directly without intermediaries taking a 20% cut. But the problem stands on where to find them.

So here's my question: Where do you people get your Logo and Corporate Designs these days?

If you have limited design needs and a small but actual budget, you can hire a designer on Upwork at a normal western hourly rate to design your logos and collateral.

You'll need to wade through proposals to find someone good, but this worked really well for us.

I don't recommend fiverr or the like. When you pay almost nothing, it's too likely that you will get plagiarized designs. Pay someone for a day or two of real work. It's worth it for your company.

Check out www.designjoy.co. They do all kinds of design (including logo, website, business cards, etc.) and have a very interesting business model that might fit your needs.

I am not affiliated with them in any way but it's the first thing that came to mind because I read a lot about their success as the founder often shares his/hers experience of building a design agency on IndieHackers.

I am in a similar situation as you are. Our logo is also just a name written in Roboto font [1]

It’s enough. We also don’t have any illustrations on our website. Just text that explains our value proposition.

How many logos do you know? Apple, Google, Uber. Logos a damn hard.

How many companies do I know which I do not remember a logo? Stripe, Segment, etc. billion dollars companies which I know without a logo even though I might use them every day.

So, to just sum it up. You don’t need a logo, or design guidelines until you’re big enough that you can easily spend $10-50k to shape your brand — because that’s how much it usually cost for a good branding. Everything else will most likely be a waste of money, and more importantly waste of your time.

[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/

I run a UX/UI & branding studio focusing on early stage companies. If you're just looking for a simple, aesthetically pleasing word mark (without any strategy / design system work), and are willing to wait until we have a designer benched, I'm happy to help on the house. (ps@tonik.pl)

Alternatively, I'd recommend going through Dribbble, there's a ton of quality designers there, although the price points will be significantly higher compared to designers from fiverr, and 99designs.

I also recommend going through the "Google Branding Sprint" exercise as a first step, and then treating the outcome as a brief for whoever you end up hiring.