How much should you pay for a logo design?

Great idea for a thread. Our MLS logo was already created when I bought the site back in 2006. Although we rebuilt the site from scratch and the only thing we kept was the logo albeit in different colours! So actually worked out to be quite expensive 

But has the elaborate logo had it’s day? Look at most of the modern big brands and its more about text and font rather than logo.

We had a local designer come up with logo concepts for a new project a few years ago and proved to be a good exercise. Think he gave us about 8 different alternatives, then we drilled down to a single design. Think cost was a couple of hundred quid which for work done seemed pretty reasonable.

My friend made my logo for free....I think I will cry if and when I need a new one, I full appreciate it takes time though.

The logo cost should always take into account the complexity of the work, combined with how much ground work the client is willing to put forward to make getting to your ideal logo quicker - the faster you can get there, the cheaper it will end up!

Generally speaking, a logo is assumed to be passed along with all copyright in tact, which means you are not only selling the logo, you are selling your copyright, so that also must be taken into account.

A good, affordable designer will hand it over and leave it in a format that making assets from it is easy, so the later collateral will also come cheaper.

If I am the only designer working on a logo, I will charge £200 for the logo and the copyright attached with it, and I'll always make it so I can tweak it easily if needed - it will also bring down the costs of later assets. Yes, you can get a cheaper logo from other places (think £30 - £50) but the logo you will get will reflect that price - low resolution, constructed in such a way that it won't be easy or simple to apply it to, say, a large format banner for a stall, and they will be unlikely to offer you colour variations, or variations full stop. In fact, for that price, they will likely not contact you at all during production, which is a terrible no-no when needing a bespoke design! Either that or they will rip-off an already existing logo so you won't be getting that unique logo you really want!

Feel free to ask any design questions!

Good post RK Design. Do you see fewer image style logo requests these days versus text (like Rebecca's above) or is there still a demand for a more traditional logo? 

Generally speaking, a good visual design for a logo is preferred. It's the quickest way to imprint on potential customers on who you are - a simple visual image will stick in their minds longer than just text. Think of the Golden Arches of McDonald's or any other very memorable logos that stick with you - they have games for this sort of thing that's how easy their logos are to remember!

I do get text-based ones sometimes, some companies do very complicated things and so it's very difficult to encapsulate them into a single coherent image.

Traditional logos, think like Harley Davidson's old logo and so on, are so complex that at certain scales they are unreadable and unmemorable, so they have fallen out of fashion, and I would recommend to go for something simpler.

Hope that helps!