How much will a logo cost?

At Swish Design our "base" logo design price is $450. This gives us four hours of design time as this is the absolute minimum we believe we need to provide you with suitable options.

Think about it - your logo will grace every single piece of material related to your business ... from stationery to signage to advertising to your website. It will be EVERYWHERE. It is pretty much the most important thing you will create when starting up a new business thus you should be prepared to do it properly.

Yes, you may get the situation where we absolutely nail it within the initial 4 hours but you should never "settle" when it comes to your logo. So we recommend allocating at least $800-1000 in your preliminary budget for the creation of your logo.

How much will a website cost?

A website is a business resource that is available to the public 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is perhaps your hardest working "employee" and your single most important marketing tool. In this day and age your potential customers EXPECT you to have a website and will go looking for it before engaging your services. If your website is sloppy and unprofessional, then people visiting your site will assume your organisation is sloppy and unprofessional too. Your website is the next item after your logo that you should be prepared to do really well. And of course doing something well takes time ... and can thus cost a significant amount!

At Swish Design we recognise that not everyone has a bottomless pit of cash so we offer website solutions to suit every budget. Our simplest solutions are still beautiful, professional, informative and supportive of your organisation's branding. The bigger your budget, the more bells and whistles we can add and the harder we can make your website work for you!

What is the difference between a logo, corporate identity and branding?

This is a tough question to try and summarise in a couple of paragraphs! But in a nutshell:

Your logo is the main visual item that represents you in the marketplace. The primary function of your logo is to be recognised. What is "recognition"? It is when people see your logo somewhere and think "oh yes, I've seen that before" and a link is created in their mind between your logo and the concept they have of your organisation.

Which leads to branding. Someone recognises your logo - and the "concept" your logo conjures in their mind is hopefully consistent with your branding. We hope when people see our Swish logo that they immediately think "friendly, great service, great design" because that is how we brand ourselves. Many elements contribute to your branding, from the way you answer the phone to how you dress for work to what your invoices look like!

And this is where your corporate identity comes in. Your corporate identity is not just your stationery, but the consistent application of certain design elements to all material associated with your organisation. This consistency assists in recognition and should support your branding. There is no point us branding ourselves "friendly and approachable" and then using an aggressive "angry" colour such as red in all our marketing. Your corporate identity also incorporates many "design elements" including, but not limited to, your logo. As an example, in addition to the Swish Design logo, we also use our company colours and "Swish Girl" as design elements that are consistently applied across all our marketing material.

I have a friend who will charge me $30/hr to design a flyer for me - how do you justify charging $110/hr for your time?

Well firstly, please be aware that industry standard for graphic design starts at around $130/hr. At Swish Design we love working with small businesses and not-for-profits so we aim to provide quality design, but at a more affordable price. We don't feel we should have to "justify" our hourly rate - but essentially when you engage our services you don't just get quality design performed by industry professionals with many years of experience, you also get fantastic service and maximum efficiency. So your friend who charges $30/hr may take four hours to do your flyer while we may take an hour. And your friend might take a week or two ... or three to finalise the job! While we would take a day or two. The maths seems easy to me! Trust us - we have had to finish that many jobs that someone's friend started but never completed. We know how it works!

You estimated it would take about two hours to produce a flyer for me but it ended up taking four hours. How did this happen?

When we provide you with an estimate for a job, you will notice that we always include the request that you provide us with all text and imagery associated with the job. This means we know exactly what we are working with straight up and can produce a first draft for you quickly and efficiently. Sometimes a client will say "here's most of the content ... I'll send you the rest tomorrow but can you get started" - or they will say "we don't have any suitable images, can you find some for us". This introduces inefficiencies into the system. As soon as we have to find images for you, this easily adds an hour to any job. Or we can typeset your flyer and "leave room" for the content you have said is coming, only to find that you have sent a page of content to fit into a half page area. So we then have to re-typeset the whole flyer and before you know it another hour has been added to the time spent.

So in a nutshell, if you want a job to proceed in the most efficient and cost effective manner, you need to provide us with everything related to the job up front. Any concept type work also increases the time spent on a job quite quickly.

What is "concept type work"?

We are design professionals. We are most skilled at taking a provided concept and combining it with the content provided to produce a great looking piece of design! Sometimes though we get a client who says "you're the designer ... see what you can come up with". This means we first have to devise the conceptual base of the design and THEN do the actual design work. We don't mind doing concept work but it does takes a significant amount of time and can easily double the hours estimated for a job.

Why didn't you optimise my website for the Search Engines when you created it?

Search Engine Optimisation is a specialised area of web design and takes a significant amount of time and ongoing assessment. When we build a website for you, we do certain things that allow for easy cataloguing by the search engines but ultimately, if you want your website optimised, it is an additional service that needs to be separately quoted. For more information about what you can do with your web designer to best optimise your site for the search engines before paying for a dedicated SEO program, click here.