I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of this. I've used 99designs in the past with moderate success, and this looks like a natural next step for their logo market. For a while, the participating designers have submitted the same logo, modified for a company, for any contest where it would fit. This marketplace appears to be aimed at ending that silly charade.
Would you consider buying a logo here? I can see using it to get a quick-and-dirty logo for an early stage project, but I didn't see many I'd be excited to build a major brand on.
I think it is a poor choice for me but a great choice for my neighborhood pizza shop, who would love to have a professionally-done logo and do not care a whit if it is shared with a pizza shop in Normal Bloomington, Moscow, and London.
This is the democratization of design, where the Fortune 5 Million can have routine access to mass-customized graphic art somewhere above the quality of MS Word ClipArt and (I'll be charitable) below the quality of the designers who want to charge four figures for a logo which embodies the unique values and messaging of The Neighborhood Pizza Shop.
I think this is a great choice for you. Nobody in your target market will know that you bought a logo off the rack and had it tailored. They're just going to think you're so professional that you have a logo like a Microsoft product.
The median-quality logo here --- and I don't think this will give offense since you didn't do your own logo --- looks more professional than your current one.
They're just going to think you're so professional that you have a logo like a Microsoft product.
If my designer gave me something which could pass muster at Microsoft or Apple, I would fire his ass and get something made for people who are scared of things that Microsoft and Apple make.
I knew you were going to react that way to that wording, but I had to get out the door to meet Erin for lunch. No matter: I found the perfect Patrick McKenzie logo anyways:
WHY is it a poor choice for you? I've always been impressed by your metrics-driven choices.
Do you think that if you A/B tested your favorite choice from this service that it'd meaningfully change your success? I don't hate your current logo, but as an (sorta ex) designer, I wouldn't nominate it for any awards. What is the business value of "embodying the unique values and messaging" of your business?
Related: trying to ignore what you've come to believe about Google, do you think their original logo embodied their unique values and messaging? I sure as heck don't.
My view is that the logo is a pretty damn tiny part of the BRAND-- and the brand is where the value is. Your business is awesome because of your brand. A great logo or crappy logo can nudge the quality of the brand but not as much as designers think.
Do you think that if you A/B tested your favorite choice from this service that it'd meaningfully change your success?
Probably not, honestly. I'm currently in the process of setting up a graphical A/B test for all my conversion buttons, which I think will majorly move the needle and give me ways to move it in the future. (Tweak button texts, tweak button colors, tweak button orders, etc etc. These are all hard for me in the status quo because I don't have the buttons ready to go, and I have the graphic design ability of a drunken lemur.)
This might not be obvious, but all A/B tests are not created equal in terms of implementation difficulty. The cheapest A/B test is a change to page copy: it is literally one line and done. I started three of them last night, testing microcopy in my shopping cart such as "You do not need an account to pay with a credit card through Paypal."
Buttons are a wee bit harder to A/B test because they're often seen in many pages throughout my site and, stupidly, they're not currently implemented as some sort of render :partial => '/static/easily_replaceable_buttons'. That means it is going to take me a couple hours to get the button tests ready sitewide, and I have to disable page caching to do it.
Yanking my logo is harder still. In addition to being on every page in the site (which means I have to turn off page caching entirely, which is going to require some thought about performance consequences), there are a few places where it is used offsite, for example in the top bar of my Paypal payment pages. Changing logos right at the shopping cart is probably not a great idea. Changing that sucker will require an hour or two of work, for boring technical reasons.
No different than using a website template / theme, or royalty free music. It all depends on what you're doing, and what parts of your business you want to be unique about.
For some businesses, and perhaps some stage of nearly any business, a logo from the 99designs store seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Would you consider buying a logo here? I can see using it to get a quick-and-dirty logo for an early stage project, but I didn't see many I'd be excited to build a major brand on.