Welcome to the Jungle

Monday, September 11, 2006 at 05:11pm by Evan Prieskop in Start-Ups

Graphic design. Every business will eventually need some. Be it for logos, advertising, signage, or promotional materials you will need someone with an artistic hand and a visual creativity to lend their support to your business.

Unless you or one of your partners happens to be an artist on the side, this means hiring outside help. Certainly, if you can afford it, go to a graphic design firm and pay the big bucks, but that is not always in the budget.

It was not in the budget for me as I was getting ready to start my first business, so I turned to my network of friends and family. To the young entrepreneur, professional and semi-professional artists can seem to be in their own world, a place dangerous and distant. I received several encouraging bids for creating my company’s logo and a specialized font for our print advertising. I eventually settled on a friend of my sister’s, a woman who had her own graphic design firm and offered to do the work for about $100 (a favor for a friend rate).

What came back might be described as “exactly what I paid for”. Her design work was simple, not to say simplistic, and the font was unremarkable. In the end, she gave me everything I asked for, exactly as I asked for it, but it was all totally unusable because it lacked any aesthetic distinction or uniqueness.

Game stores draw a generally left-brained crowd, and I felt that the artistic representations put forward by our store needed to be something special–something with just the right combination of “attractive” and “strange”…you can see how this concept is difficult to describe, much less lay out for a graphic designer to create. The work I received, while including all the elements I requested, lacked these final, vital qualities.

In the end, with time running our and options limited, I simply stashed away the first set of work and hired a local artist to do the work for us. He requested $600 dollars for the job. It was more than I wanted pay, especially given that I was out $100 already, but I was determined not to make the same mistake twice.

$700 dollars is a lot to pay for a logo and a font, especially for a skin-of-our-teeth start-up working with a sharply curtailed budget. Yet, his work was perfect. We used his logo repeatedly (including on the sign I wrote about a few days ago) and his font was exactly what we needed. Our customers repeatedly mentioned, and offered appreciation for, our logo.

I ventured out of my familiar, clean business world and into the wicked jungles of the artists. My mistake is not that I did so at all, for the result was both necessary and beneficial, but that I did so without enough carefulness, reconnaissance, and research. I tried to treat the transaction like any other: find the cheapest price for sufficient product and buy. But aesthetics are tricky, and they refuse to follow simple rules or be summarized in bullet points. Keep this in mind when it comes time for your own graphics work and you may avoid making the same mistake.

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