Logos are great, a small piece of visual shorthand that represents something much bigger. A brand, a product, a service. Our lives are full of them and we each have hundreds, maybe thousands that we instantly recognise and which have complex meanings for us. Ferrari’s prancing horse, Coca Cola, Apple, Google, Intel, Marlboro, McDonald’s, Dell, Kellogg’s, MTV, Shell and so many more are recognised by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

You can pay a lot of money for a logo. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in branding exercises that sometimes end in failure. At a more normal, everyday, level an artist or marketing agency will basically charge what they can get away with. Sometimes, when you are buying print, web design or advertising, the logo comes for “free”.

But it is not the price that matters. It is the image. There are so many logos around that many now look like each other which destroys the whole point. Even very major organisations can end up with nondescript images to represent themselves. For this reason I have always preferred text based logos that spell out the brand name. You need to be a very big brand indeed, like say Mercedes Benz with their three pointed star, to get away with anything else.

And now, just like everything else, branding has met the internet. And like everything else it has driven down price and driven up convenience. So now we have services like 25 Pound Logo who I have just used to create a logo for the Harbury Villagebuzz website. There are similar services in America, but the geographical location is irrelevant.

Although these prices are cheap the service certainly isn’t. You create a brief and they very rapidly send you a selection of rough ideas. You can pick from these and/or revise an unlimited number of times. The logos are unique and original created by real artists and are not just clipart or templates. The service is just as good, or possibly better, as going to a fancy expensive branding company. For Villagebuzz I went through two sets of submissions to get what I wanted which was then made into finished artwork, all in just a few days.

At this price you can create useful logos for all sorts of things that you maybe wouldn’t have bothered with before: for a company department or studio, within a game, to represent a concept or idea, for a building or even a room within a building and so on. The possibilities are endless. You can certainly go and have some fun with this!