The Going Rate For a Logo
… varies. Obviously! This compilation of famous logo costs is pretty fun, if unsourced and also sometimes wrong. FOR EXAMPLE!
1. The new Pepsi logo (well, new as of 2009) cost $1,000,000, they say. Which, okay, that one’s right. Pepsi basically wrote a firm called Arnell Group a check for $1 million, and they came up with a logo and some really, really extensive reasons for why they came up for the logo (“the Breathtaking Color Palette is derived using a scientific method of color assignment based on the product’s essence and primary features”) (lolololololol).
2. The Accenture Logo (which, is the new name of Andersen Consulting after the old name became synonymous with scandal), they say, cost $100,000,000, which: No, it didn’t. They did not pay someone ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to come up with a name and a logo. They paid that money to come up with a name and a logo and then rebrand their entire company—website, stationary, polo shirts, IDK what else. Corporations are mysteries.
3. I got sick of Googling the rest of them, but if you feel like picking up where I left off and find anything interesting, holla at the comments.
4. Also I just asked People Who Know These Things how much our logo cost, and the answer to that is more than free but less than $1 million dollars. I would like to say how much, but I will not because: What if I wrote what we paid, and then another client of the designer saw that and paid more and got angry at the designer ? Not my place to get people angry at other people. Anyway: I want to be transparent but transparency is complicated. I also want to tell you how much money I get paid to do things like write blog posts and other things sometimes, but the thing is, that kind of information written on the internet has the power to set off a butterfly effect that Will Take Down a Web Empire (maybe) (or at least make people who give me money think twice about giving me money again). One day everyone shall know all things! I guess when I run for president and my tax records get released. In the meantime, Logos: Sometimes they are very expensive and sometimes they are less expensive, but they are all still drawings, drawings that sometimes have words.
My favorite thing I’ve ever seen about logos is this video of impressions by a five-year-old kid: Adam Ladd Youtube
“A turkey that’s very colorful, like a rainbow.”
Maybe the big corporations should reassess how much they’re willing to pay by what a child could get out of it.
Oh man don’t get me started on how much design shit costs. Very glad I got out of the website-makin’ business, because nobody ever believed me when I told them what the going rate for the logo-and-branding portion was.
If you think about it, some of those are actually pretty low. Like, “the famous Paul Rand” would have to do a couple of iconic corporate logos per year just to earn a decent living.
Also: it makes sense to think of them in terms of impressions. How many hundreds of millions of times does the BBC logo get seen every year? Let’s say it’s been seen 5 billion times since 1997 (a conservative estimate), that’s like 0.04 cents per time.
@stuffisthings Also the BP and Accenture rebrandings were both attempts to A) make the company look more “green” and B) get out from under a cloud of scandal. That requires some proactive advertising. Once you start throwing in glossy full-page magazine ads and TV spots, $100 million or $200 million starts to look like not so much money.
@stuffisthings This is an honest question: Do you love Ayn Rand?
@Jake Reinhardt Why, do I come across as some kind of libertarian?
I’m going to go cry in a corner (with the left-wing economists who secretly think corporate income taxes are inefficient) now.
I went to a design conference in June and Armin Vit had a session about designing the killer logo. The first thing he told us was to not design logos that look like a wang. And then we looked at a ton of logos, good and bad. The best ones were the simplest ones, and I think that’s why a lot of people think logos are overpriced, saying ‘Well I could do that,’ to a simple collection of lines and shapes and occasionally color. Sometimes, they’re overpriced shit (like the Pepsi monstrosity up there, or the gradient Gap logo from earlier this year). But there’s still a creative process and piles of work to get to the end result, which is a bunch of lines and space broken up into a pleasing way that will convey who you are, on all of your company’s material: website, letterhead, business cards, other printed media, etc.
Incidentally, I had seen that BP sunburst logo out and about as early as 2005. It was a nice change from the earlier imperialist shield. No, this does not excuse them being a horrible company, etc.
Accenture’s branding had nothing to do with scandal.