Cost, Quality, Speed - Pick 3?

There’s an old adage that applies in the commercial world and applies to pretty much all industries:

Cost - Quality - Speed … Pick two

Meaning:

• If you want something fast AND high quality - you can’t expect it to be cheap.
• If you want something cheap AND high quality - you can’t expect to get it quickly.
• And if you want something to be cheap AND you want it done quickly … you’re going to sacrifice quality.

So I found it interesting when researching this article to note that there are companies out there, across a variety of industries, who are promising “Why pick two when you can have all three!!”

I admit that in very rare circumstances economy of scale might conspire to provide a high quality item quickly and at low cost. In most situations though, another well worn adage applies: “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is”. Someone promising to deliver you a design that is low cost and high quality in a short turnaround WILL be cutting corners somewhere.

Take a logo design for example. Standard logo design involves the following steps at a minimum:

• Discussion with the client about their requirements
• Researching the client’s industry and examining the logos and branding utilised by their competitors
• Preliminary sketches by the designer, a few of which are chosen to develop in digital format (drawn up in Illustrator)
• Presentation of initial concepts to client
• Tweaking of favoured concepts to completion

If each of the 5 steps above took just one hour the MINIMUM someone could expect to pay for a logo design by Swish Design would be $550 ($110/hr). Of course the process above takes much longer than that - at least 8-10 hours.

So you can be assured that if a designer offers to create a logo for you for $300, they are not following the process above - they are cutting out one or two very important steps in the design process.

So how much should you expect logo design to cost? Well that is covered here.