Logo and Web Design - Second Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference

Hi everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and welcome to the 2nd Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference. And we're here with the 6th session of the day, and I have to admit I'm feeling it a little bit. I had to have a little cup of hot tea with some honey in it. I was gonna put something alcoholic in it for a little booster, but I figured better not at this stage of the game. So happy to be here. It's been a wonderful day of some excellent sessions, and as Mia says, we're getting our learn on all over all over the place today with a lot of different topics. So we're gonna finish today off with a very important subject, and it's something I think a lot of bloggers don't take seriously enough. And I know I was one of those for a while, and it's about, you know, design work and having a professional do some work for you. And by professional, I mean someone trained in the field or someone that has at least learned it himself. No matter how you do it, you have to know what you're doing. It's not just slapping something together. And as much as I love Canva, you know, it's not the answer for everything. So you need a professional when it's time to get some work done. So I have 3 of my friends here today, and they're gonna talk— each talk about what they do a little bit. First, we're gonna say hi to everyone, but we're gonna go through the panel then and ask them to talk about what they're doing and what they— how they do it in their businesses. And then if you have questions for them, please just leave them in the comments section and we'll come back to them and we'll answer your questions for you. So I'm just gonna go from left to right on my side of the screen. I don't know where you're seeing them, but I've got Ryan Rhodes directly to my left. I want to say hi to Ryan. How you doing, buddy?

Doing good, Chef. Glad to be here. Very happy. I was just going to say my wife and I just moved 2 days ago, so we've got boxes everywhere, but you guys can't see any of that, so I look— I'm doing great.

I'm telling you, your picture is excellent, though.

I've got lighting. Lighting makes a big difference.

Lighting and bandwidth, always a good thing. Works together. So I'm happy to have you here. We'll talk some more in a little bit. And then, this is the first time we've actually met face-to-face, and Andrew, and I'd like to say hi to you. We had a common bond that neither of us really knew. Both of us, I worked in the area you're from.

Yep, yep, Flowertown. I grew up there, and no, it's— I knew a bunch of Mount girls. Let's just leave it at that. But anyway, yeah, so I'm CEO of Wheel Media, and I do branding, graphic design, web design, basically anything that your business needs online or off. But I'm happy to be here today to talk to you guys. Excited.

And we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about what you do. And Aaron, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you here, and we've done some work with you and Mia, and hope to talk to you a little bit more, and you can tell us a little bit about what you do in a little bit.

I'm a freelance graphic designer working in Massachusetts. Like Ryan just moved, I'm getting ready to move back to where I used to live in Western Mass. But right now I'm out near Boston. And I do everything from logo design, book cover design, custom posters, business cards, everything. So banners and everything. I've done a lot of work for people on G+. That's basically my background and what I'm doing right now. Self-employed for over a year now.

Sounds good. We're going to talk about some logo design and different things in a little bit. So again, if you have questions, please leave them in the comment bar for us. And I'm just going to say hi. Kristen Mattis is here and says, I hope the drinking lamp is lit for you for all your work today. I toast you with a Schaffenhoffer grapefruit if I was nearby. I think that's how I pronounce it. I might need a drink to pronounce that actually, but we'll leave it at that. Guys, we're going to get going and let's just dig right in and we'll go the same route we just did and talk a little bit about, a little more in depth, what's involved in something that you do. Like if I came to you and said, "I need a design." Ryan, we'll start with you.

Okay, well the first thing that I usually like to ask people is number one, who are you? What is it that you're wanting to communicate? Because in The way that I look at graphic design, it's obviously all about communicating a message to whoever sees it. And whether that's a logo or a banner, a business card, whatever— Chef, we just did your business cards— those are the kind of questions that I like to ask people is, "Who are you and what are you trying to communicate?" And for example, whenever I have logo design jobs come through, I'll ask a lot of really seemingly random questions, but for me they're not random. They help me understand your personality because whenever you're putting a logo on your business, whatever it is, you obviously want it to be part of who you are. You want it to be an extension of your personality. And so I'll ask questions like, you know, what kind of music do you like? What kind of movies do you like? If this logo was a song, what song would it be? And kind of more abstract questions so that I can kind of get in your head a little bit. I also like to ask, you know, send over some examples of logos that you like and logos that you don't, and maybe tell me why you like them, why you don't like them. Not so much like, "Oh, I like this because it's clean." You know, that communicates a little bit, but, you know, maybe help nail down the color scheme, things like that. I mean, there's so many different questions that go into it. A lot of people who really don't have experience with this stuff, they'll think that design is just kind of slapping something together, but it's, it's a really involved process, especially if you want it done right, and I'm sure everyone else here would agree. But, you know, once we kind of nail down the basic overall feel of what it is that you're looking for, I will usually come up with several concepts for you to choose from, and then once you pick that concept, if you want revisions, what I actually end up doing is I go on a Google+ Hangout, a private one with you, and then we do the revisions that way rather than back and forth over email. I share my screen, so it's kind of like you're in the room with me and you can see the process that I use to design things. And if you, you know, want a font change or you want something moved or whatever, it's like I can show you what that would look like in real time. And it's been a phenomenal process. I just started doing that probably a couple of months ago, and it's been great because it saves so much time for both me and the client. Because you actually see your ideas unfold in real time. And, you know, maybe you have an idea on something, but then whenever you see it in front of you, you're like, ah, you know, that doesn't really look so good. And it just really works out very well. Chef, I think you can attest to that fact.

I'm taking that idea, by the way. I'm going to be using that.

Let me tell you, it was one of the best experiences I've ever had. It was easy because, I mean, working with other designers, sometimes we would go on Skype. I don't know why they wouldn't use Google+ Hangouts but it was by Skype. Never really got that concept across but being able to see it in front of you. Like I told Ryan, there's a reason I'm not a designer because I think this is going to look really, really good and when he put it up it was like, oh no, that's not right. You have to have a good relationship with your designer too I think and trust that they see— in your mind you always see this perfect design, you know, that's just gonna say it all. But transmitting that to another person is very difficult. You have to try and see what I'm saying. Very good.

Just a quick heads up, words like, I want it to pop, I want it to be stylish, make it edgy, make it creative— that doesn't communicate anything to us, just so you know.

I'm just glad you didn't ask me for a song because I might have said, she's a brick house or something. That would have just thrown us all off. Alright, so let's move over to Andrew. And Andrew, now you did not go to school for graphic and stuff as you were telling me. You were more self-taught, was that right?

Yeah, I'm actually a mechanical engineer by school. I was always interested in— I did web design since high school, I guess since it was 2003, I guess.

Back in the old days, huh?

Yeah, right, right. So, you know, GeoCities, right? No, that was even, I think, after GeoCities. But anyway, I got involved in web design, and I really liked it. Did it as a hobby. I helped a few people with their sites kind of thing, but never really did anything big with it. And a few years later, I ended up getting involved with this little upstart known as Google+ and decided I wanted to shift into marketing from engineering. I didn't like the offers I was getting as an engineer, and I decided to switch. So I've been teaching myself marketing principles. I mean, why go back to college? I already paid for my engineering degree, so, you know, I can teach myself. But as far as design work, my wife is also a graphic designer by trade. She actually went to school for it. She went to Drexel, and she works full-time as a graphic designer. So I do have her— she generally takes the lead on the logo design, and I'll take the lead on the website design as far as taking her the image and the color scheme and then porting it over to a site with good, you know, everything put together well. But yeah, I think we work as a team, definitely.

So when you do web designs, we were talking earlier in the green room about WordPress, and which WordPress theme do you really like the most?

Oh, I have a folder with 90-some themes at the moment, and it's growing. I like to use a theme as a base, you know, something you can go to—

Oh, a platform, I mean, like Genesis or—

Oh, oh, just simple WordPress. WordPress on a self-hosted site. I literally just go to wordpress.org, get the latest install, and drop it in there. I just find for me it's the easiest. I found it's the easiest for me to be able to teach people to be able to pick up and do themselves. What I like about WordPress is I've been able to teach people to then take over the site themselves and update with posts and kind of instead of having to pay a web developer for routine mundane tasks, they can do it themselves, and I really like that about it. Flexibility. So it's good.

Okay, good. Aaron, let's talk to you a little bit about what you've been doing, and what is your main focal point? You were talking about doing book covers and posters, and what makes— what do you like to do the most? What would be your favorite part of design?

Probably book covers right now. I really have captured my interest over the last 6 months or so. Yeah, coming up with—

more of an illustrator then?

Not necessarily. Some people want something very minimally designed on their cover. By going by a lot of my Art Deco and retro-style posters, people like that look, so they come to me seeking a book cover along those lines. Sometimes I have to illustrate people. One of my first clients just wanted some scales of justice and radial sunbursts and stuff like like that with a nice retro font. I can do illustration though, that's what I went to college for. So if people do need something that's beyond just type and layout, I can help them with that also.

Where do you go? I know this is something I always think it's easy to find images to use, and it's not. So if I tell you like I want a picture of something I'm almost expecting that either you can draw it or you can just pull one out of the web somewhere, and that's not quite that simple, is it?

Well, there's tons of stock houses out there if you're looking for stock imagery. I tend to avoid, uh, most stock imagery because that just means that the client has to purchase more images or whatever. I'll try to do something illustrative or graphic to meet their needs rather than go to a stock house.— there was a client I was working with a while back that wanted to use a stock image in the area, had actually purchased it and finally tracked it down because he had it in his archives, and then he had to find the high-res version, and it was a little bit of a mess, but in the end he basically just said, "Here's the image, throw a type on it." You know, we didn't end up working out with that client anyway. He went in a different direction, which he actually went with an illustrator But for the most part, I try to come up with all original stuff. And I know when I get a job if I can't handle it. I won't be like, yeah, I can illustrate, you know, 40 people on a book cover of multiethnic origins and different ages and genders and everything. I'll know, and I'll tell them, you know, here's somebody that could do it, or this just isn't going to work out. But that's one of the first things I get out of the way with the client too, is, you know, am I the right person for this job? And, you know, a lot of people come to me and ask me to do something. Very little time though I cannot do a project. You know, I'll try to do anything, but I know my limitations.

I think that's important, and it's actually better for your client if you're telling them that you can't do something. And, you know, it's just like we were talking about blogs before. A lot of time people will come to us with jobs, and you really You really need to think about what it is and if you can do it well for them because your name goes on it. And if you give them something that you did the best you could on but it's not really the best they could get, your name is on that. So I think you really need to be careful and that's good advice for everything. I have a question for all of you and if you can all chime in on it. Colors. The biggest problem I have is with picking colors and color design. Is there a way, a fail-proof way to find those?

You know, they have these charts out there and they're like, these social media sites use these color logos and these department stores use these color logos and these fast food restaurants use these color logos because they evoke certain things. You know, when I'm hungry, I couldn't give a crap if McDonald's has a purple and blue logo. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna get food. Or if a restaurant, you know, has a certain color— it doesn't really matter to me. I know it does to some people, but if you can give the client something at the end of the day where they're like, "Okay, I can live with those colors," and you yourself as a designer can live with those colors— I mean, most color theory— you should know most color theory if you're a designer. You know, you should know not to put red type on a blue background, or vice versa. You know, you should know what visually looks appealing to the eye and doesn't beat you in the head with a brick and say, "I am terrible." Please—

also no gradients.

No gradients. No gradients. You want clean, flat design in most of your stuff, or you want to use vector. You can use gradients if you're a master of Illustrator or Corel or something that uses vectors, something that can be scaled up. Somebody who's doing some kind of half-assed type, script type with a gradient fill to make it look metallic over it, should just back away. You know, but the thing is, is people out there, that's what most people want. They want to go to a cheap and simple— sorry guys, getting over pneumonia here— cheap, simple designer and say like, here, I want, I want something, and they don't know quite what they want. It's a certain client that comes to you and says, Okay, I want this certain look, and I'm putting everything in your hands, and I'm gonna trust you. You know, I get— I still get a lot of people that say, can you do X, Y, and Z? And I'm just like, no, never, you don't want this, and okay, I'll think about that one. And it makes me sound pretentious, but like you said, you put your name on the thing. So if somebody's looking and they want their colors to be lime green and, you know, orange You can try to tackle it, but you can always try to steer the client and say, "Hmm, maybe this isn't going to work." I know, I know, because then when you give it to them, it's your fault that it didn't work.

So it's better to let them know up ahead of time.

Exactly.

We have a couple of questions up here. Let me put them up. Kim Pebbley is saying, "Do you feel that the paid WordPress themes are worth the price, or do you find that it's better to redesign one of their basic themes?" Go to ThemeForest.net and buy one for $50.

They're amazing, they work perfectly. I just, I live by that. I mean, it's great, it saves you time. Why reinvent the wheel, so to speak? You just need something simple, you need a menu, you need, you know, nice scrolling images that's responsive.

There's one that I, another one that I use, I've used ThemeForest, For sites that I've designed, I've used Elegant Themes. Elegant Themes. That's one of the— they just put out a really great update to one of their themes. It's incredibly customizable if you know what you're doing.

And that site's one of those that you actually have a subscription to and you get all of the themes. Correct. You don't have to buy one theme, so, you know, might be good for a small agency or startup. Right.

Again, is it a good idea for me as a blogger to go do that, though? Or should I just ask someone who knows what they're doing to go do that?

I mean, would you have a dentist— would you do your own dental work?

How safe do you feel doing something like that? It depends. If you want to get a really custom theme that you love, you want to throw it up there, and you want to take the time to pop the hood and tinker with the thing, go for it. But if you want something down and dirty and you like the design, that's what's good about going to some of these design houses. For the most part, a lot of the stuff is hopefully curated so it doesn't look like garbage. And just go pick something out, and then if you need help and you can't figure the stuff out, whether it's a tutorial online or something like that or on the website, then ask a designer like Andrew or Ryan to step in and be like, hey, how do you implement this? How can I make this happen? Rather than just get frustrated, you know, it's okay to ask for help on things.

That'd be great if, yeah, if a client came to me with their WordPress theme that they already picked out from the site and I just had to install it, man, that would save a lot of time because actually scrolling through the tens of thousands of themes and trying to find something you're like, "Wonder what they'll like." You know, I mean, and it does come into some research, you know, obviously you have to think about the audience and what they need on the site. It's different for everyone but I don't know. Yeah.

Sorry.

I actually had a client one time when I worked at a print shop that came to us and said, "Here's a copy of InDesign 2. You guys can have this. Work on our job because we're going to be using this platform from now on. We want you to install it." And my boss was actually going to buy it the next week, so it was kind of fortuitous that they just gave us the package. And they gave us the tools that we needed to use because they knew down the road they were going to be using that platform. Same thing with the theme. I want to use this theme. This is going to represent my brand, my business. Here you go, designer, work it up for me, and I can just sit back and not, you know, try to worry about making this thing work.

Um, there's a—

I see you answered it, Bryan, but I'm gonna throw it up here. Sam Mead says, who ultimately owns the final digital format, whether it be a logo or book cover?

Oh, I could give such a wise-ass answer to this one.

It's you!

It's you, the client! The client owns it. If your designer is taking you the work and being like, I own this, you know, I own this book cover. No, what it should be is the designer says, hey, can I put this in my portfolio and use it as experience? They should get paid, of course. Yes, that all gets worked out, but ultimately the person, the client that comes to the designer owns that job. I always make sure they get a high-res version of it. They get— even if they don't know what the hell to do with the high-res file, if they're just using it as an ebook and I'm giving them a PNG or JPEG or something depending on what specs for the site, but give the client the full package when they're done. I do know designers that will not do that though, and that is terrible.

I mean, give them the fonts too, you know, try to give them everything.

You know what, in the end, outline all the fonts, outline everything. That'll maybe come to some repeat business in the future if they're like, "Okay, we want to take this person's name off the COVID and put this person's name on." You know, stuff like that is little stuff, but I never try to give the client— I just give them a nice flattened high-res file, and if they need something in the future, they'll come back. But yeah, the client— if you go to a designer, you should be getting all the stuff in the end, the packaging and all that stuff, rather than the designer. They should be able to use it in a portfolio, which, unless it's stipulated by the client that This is a one-time shot thing, you can't use it, you know, whatever legal contractions. But yeah, you guys should own it, we should do the work, and then it should go to you, and then we can keep it in our stable, in our portfolio.

I want to chime in on that too. I had answered to Sam in the comments section that, you know, depending on what kind of use it's going to be, what project, I've done different projects where we were hired on to do social media images for particular clients where they could get shared around and that kind of thing. And we had initially been hired on to just do them for social media, and then later on they said, oh, we're going to start printing merchandise on this and putting this stuff on merchandise and blah blah blah. And so I had written something into the contract that if they wanted to use it for more than social media, that they would have to contact for, like, if there was going to be a royalty or something like like that. But, you know, that's just— there's so many different arenas that that kind of stuff can come into play. But ultimately, you know, you do want to make sure that you as the client are getting the high-res things. Because like Aaron said, I've run into so many people who they had a designer do like a business card or a logo or something, and they hold the stuff hostage and basically end up like not being willing to deliver it and they end up nickel and diming the client. I just— that's just not cool at all. It makes us all look bad. So, advice?

Hey, Ryan, I think you answered a question from Kim Pebley earlier and she's talking about it again. I think she had some work done on Fiverr. Brian Rhodes, they asked for clip art and changed it a bunch. I guess it comes down to you do get what you pay for. I need to decide a budget for a logo. What is the average that you or most logo designers charge? And that's probably going to be a very hard question to answer, but—

Yeah, I mean, me personally, I just answered her in the comments section. I actually just had to recently raise my prices just because of workload, but I personally start logo design at $650. And, you know, there's a lot of people less than me, there's a lot of people who charge more than me, and You talk to any designer and there's going to be this massive variation in rates and things like that, and it's kind of just the name of the game. You just have to find a designer whose stuff you like, and if you really want them to do it, then, you know, that's the budget that you have to pay.

The difficult part about it is, right, so let's say we'll do a logo for, you know, a big corporation, but I'll also do a logo for a professional, and to the professional, that logo is not worth as much technically as it is to that large corporation who's making $1 million in a year. I mean, it's— so there's definitely a sliding scale when it comes to that. You know, I've done logos as low as $200, $300 for someone that tried to lowball me at $50, and I just wanted to get it done and be done with it, which I then regretted later, and he ended up using paint to draw stuff on it and ruin the whole thing. Anyway, it's— he literally—

it looked like he hand-drew shading into there because Anyway, I've said this before in other Design Hangouts when I've been interviewed, I always find out from the client what their budget is right off the bat, you know, and some people are like, "Well, never, don't talk money right away because it'll scare clients off." I always try to get that out of the way and, you know, I've done, you know, as designers, yes, we should be paid. I have done some free work in the past for some people be it friends or a charity or something like that. But for the most part, if I say to the client, "What's your budget for this book cover?" and they're like, "I can pony up X amount," and I feel that that's fair, even if it's, you know, $500-$600 more than somebody else offered me for another job, I'll take the job rather than be like, "Here's a flat rate." Plus, I tend to work quick. And if I charged hourly, I would work myself out of a job. So I tend to say like, okay, I have this amount of bills this week, I can take this many— this much logo work and at this amount minimum, and this much. And if somebody then tries to lowball me under those numbers, I'll be like, nah, I can't really do that $50 logo, you know, I'm gonna need at least $250 or whatever. Because— and also Ryan brought up use. You know, if you do a logo for somebody for $75 and then they wind up— it's for like a sports team or something and it's the face of the franchise and they use it all over the place for decades. For decades. Then you're getting, as a designer, kind of getting screwed. You know, you've done that little logo, but yeah, so you gotta factor in a lot— their budget, the long-term use, short-term use. All that stuff. I know it sounds very vague, Kim, and sorry we're not being super helpful, but as far as like nailing down a target number, but if you say like you went to Fiverr for something and said, here, here's, you know, somebody will do it for me for $5, I win, you know, but you get this modified clipart thing that you're kind of—

50 pixels wide.

Yeah, I know, it's not even high-res and you can't use it anywhere and you're just like, I don't know why I did this. That's what you're gonna get, you know, and you know what, there's probably amazing designers out there that'll work for $5. They're selling themselves short, you know, but at the end of the day, it's what you are okay paying. You know, we're not looking to make anybody, you know, not eat for, you know, a month or whatever, but it's— we have to pay our bills too, so it's a fine line. You know, it's that dance, it's negotiation. I'm doing a poster right now for a steampunk and dieselpunk convention and they're like, well, you know, we're small, we're growing. I quoted them a price, they talked it over with the board, they came back to me, were like, we can do this much, and it wasn't too bad under the price, so I'm like, sure guys. I'm also a fan of this genre I'm working with, so I pulled the trigger on it and I'm working on it.

Yeah, I think that the big thing as anyone in any creative industry is You have to be willing to be flexible, especially if— I mean, there's times that, you know, I'll have a whole bunch of projects going on at once and I get so busy that I'm working, working, working and I forget to do the advertising side of my business. And so when all the projects are done, it's like, "Oh, I need to find more clients now." So there's, you know, there's so much, so many variables depending on who you're working with. And so you really just have to figure out what works for you, what works for your budget, you'll find people all across the board.

There's a comment that Sue Wright Boucher put up, and it says, "My experience working with marketing firms, they've been horrified when I said I wanted the files for completed work.

Good to hear Aaron Wood say that paying clients should own the finished product." You know, we actually dealt with a client whose previous, or, you know, I guess current company who still deals with them for, you know, a certain one task in their advertising. They actually didn't want to give access to Analytics or Webmaster Tools to be able to look at the site, but it's theirs. That's the thing. This is your company, your site. You're the client. I'm appalled that companies do that, and I mean, that's why I like calling out those companies that are doing these shady practices. It's, you know, if you see it, shout it. What's the phrasing for that?

See something, say something.

See something, say something. There you go. I mean, it's got to be that way. Warn other business owners so no one else has to go through that. It's a shame, you know, but yeah.

Now, I had a very different experience when I worked at the print shop, Susan. When I worked at the print shop, we never released high-res files because people would turn around and get things reprinted cheaper other places. After we did all the file setup work and all that kind of stuff, which had its drawbacks. Sometimes I felt dirty saying to the client, "No, we can't release these files to you." But for the most part, my boss sat us all down and he explained to us, you know, we've been burned before. We've set up these elaborate, you know, program books for people, and they'll, they'll do a small print run with us and then they'll take their files elsewhere and get them printed, you know, cheap and in bulk and whatever. You know, we were a medium to small print house at the time, you know, and we valued the quality of work that we did. You know, we did less original design for the clients rather than, hey, here's our product catalog for this month print it up, you know. So something that's like a logo and stuff like that, yeah, give it, give it to the client. Something that's like a marketing firm can kind of fall on either side. Something like a print house, expect if you're giving them your high-res files, you got them. They're setting it all up for the press. You shouldn't need those files back, you know. But something along the lines of you know, you've already pretty much got all this high-res artwork, but something like along the lines of a marketing firm, um, that's hit or miss. You know, there's giant corporations out there that don't want any of their work, you know, out there. You get exactly what's in that contract. You know, as a designer that's small like us though, yeah, I'm more than happy to give the client something because I know that in the end it's not gonna be I'm not having McDonald's come to me and say, "Redo our entire branding and campaign," and then at the end they're like, "Here's $50, thanks." That would be something completely different. It all comes down to scale, too, of the business. Not saying that we're small potatoes and shouldn't follow certain guidelines, but there's a certain thing where we're working with people who want a logo or a book cover or something. Take, take the stuff, you know, guys, we're— you're not gonna screw us out of something in the end, you know, but a larger firm might feel that need to hold on to something because they've been burned in the past. So that's just another angle to look at it at.

I just want to jump back real quick to the rates. Something to remember that as a graphic designer or any kind of web designer, we might be able to do something in an hour's time, and like Aaron was saying, he'll work himself out of a job. Like, you're not just paying for an hour of work, like in another job. I mean, you're paying for our experience, our— you know, for Aaron's choice of colors when he— like, that's something that only, you know, only few people can do. Me, I'm half colorblind. I have my wife do all the color choosing. But no, it's definitely— it's different than other industries in that way. You know, a lot of other industries, you'll have a set value of hourly, but Here you can't do that, everyone's a little different.

I just had a client recently that, you know, they had someone, they brought someone else in who wasn't the point person that I had been communicating with and, you know, the person was saying, "Oh, well, you know, I think that you should be charging us hourly and da da da." Now this is after we had already agreed on pricing, after we had already agreed on our contract, all that other stuff. And I just wanted to piggyback off what Andrew said. One of the hardest things for people who aren't in like a creative field or whatever to understand is that, you know, when you're working hourly, something that might take me 20 or 30 minutes, you know, it also took me 15 years of experience to get to the point where I can be that fluent in some of these programs. And so, you know, this isn't like filing papers. This is— I equate logos and branding to essentially establishing the foundation of your house. You don't want to skimp on it. You don't want to deal with somebody who, you know, they might be just throwing some clipart together and adding some text and changing some colors because, yeah, there might be people who are going to give you a really great deal or something like that, but at the end, I mean, I've had more people come back to me later and say, you know, we went the route of Fiverr, we went with some of these crowdsourcing websites, and, you know, we ended up spending more money later because they weren't happy with it. And so, you know, everyone's going to charge differently. I do have an hourly rate for whenever I do video editing and stuff like that. But when it comes to graphic design and things of that nature, if you charge by the hour, you know, I could bang something out in 45 minutes to an hour sometimes and not be able to feed my family, and that's just not okay.

So you have to have a $1,200 an hour rate, that's all.

Exactly.

Right, and granted, like, when I'm doing— if I have a, you know, like a monthly retainer or something like that and I have just a few little graphic design things to do, you know, put together some quote graphs graphics and stuff like that, generally I'll just include that in the hourly, but those bigger logo design projects, they have to be by project and they have to be more than $100. That's just, it's almost criminal to be, it's almost indentured servitude to be paying a designer that little for a logo. It's insulting.

But you get what you pay for too in the long run.

And yeah, that's exactly it. If you want to buy a $5 logo, the people People will tell. I mean, that's—

But you know, a lot of us, to be honest too, don't know any better.

Right.

Sure.

But then again, some people need a $5 logo. Not that they need to go to Fiverr, but that instead of having their own hosted site, you know, if they're just trying to blog just for the fun of it, like you don't have to go all professional. Go on Tumblr, go on something like that, you know, set something up that's nice, that flows, that you can put your words down, and that's all you need. We're not forcing you to pay big money for nice logos. Put your picture there, get a little chef hat on, or if you're a food blogger, for example, and done. So that's just one.

I wanted a card that when I handed it to people kind of was Bond, James Bond.

No, no, when you're doing conferences, things like that, you're definitely getting a little larger than the average blogger. That's great, I mean, it's awesome. But yeah. I mean, you don't want to convey, "Oh, Mango like candy." Right, but if you have 5 readers, you don't want to go spending— you spend $600 on a logo for your blog. You have other things you need to focus on first.

Oh, absolutely. And there is a lot of stuff out there for that, but I think, you know, again, being realistic and being a person that went the other route, and not that I was trying to be cheap, But finding the right person for the right job is very important.

And sometimes look for someone who's starting out, someone who might be talented but they need that first gig, they need something under their belt. You know, like we were saying, we've taken jobs for free, we've taken jobs for other jobs when they go, "Hey, my buddy also is going to need a logo," like I usually work out a deal, you know, just for the connection.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, we have a question here from Sam Need, and he goes, "How are you optimizing web designs for bloggers who want to integrate social media platforms?" Anybody touch that?

I only work in 50-foot canvas wall murals. I'm sorry, I'm not able to—

As far as, I mean, I don't do any specific optimizing for— I mean, because what, like I said, I do a lot I'll buy a base on ThemeForest or something like that for WordPress. But for the most part, whether you're working with HTML, PHP, WordPress, anything, you can connect it. I mean, that's what the meta tags are for. That's what— not the meta tags, the open tags. It really depends on the site. I mean, it's what do you want it to do. There's a great— for WordPress, there's a great Comments Evolved plugin lets you do whether you want Facebook comments, Google comments, Disqus comments. You can have tabs so people can pick which one they want to use. I just like Google+ comments because you get a lot of reshares. But no, it depends on what you need.

Yeah. Oh, sorry, Ryan.

Go ahead.

Oh, no.

I wasn't going to say anything.

Oh, OK. There's a lot of templates out there for design optimization depending on what site you're working for. I work with some clients that want something designed for you, a banner for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, everything. You know, stuff like that, um, you really just have to go do some research on and say it's got to be 1096 by 748, you gotta make it that. And if it's gotta be on Twitter and it's 1542 by, you know, 865, you gotta design for that too. And I try to work with the largest size and then scale everything to fit other, you know, banner sizes or whatever.

Like shuffle.

Yeah, exactly. You gotta move some things around. Some things just don't work. There's certain— okay, you got your portrait, your profile picture here, and it's over here on another one, so you gotta be able to do that. You know, are you using RGB colors to keep them nice and bright? For online stuff, but keep in mind if the client wants something in print, you know, you gotta make sure that that's CMYK. And so yeah, it's really another dance, but you got— there are guides out there that will teach you how to optimize your stuff for the web, saving it at the minimal amount where— yeah, and these days a lot of people have high-speed internet. It's not like the old days where if your banner was 150K it would take 45 seconds to load. You know, now I try to keep things on the minimum without sacrificing the quality visually, but for the most part you can get away with high settings for stuff for people, say you're designing a banner or a logo.

There's a, there's a site now, and I'll remember what it is and I'll put it in the event later, but it's literally you drag and drop your photo in and it resizes it, it does it for you. It makes it perfectly web and the fastest possible speed. You can make it in a 100-meg format and just pop it in there and it fixes it for you. So it's great.

Yeah, exactly. There are resources out there, both as a client and a designer, you can look at to optimize your images depending on what you're doing. And sometimes the designer will even have to work with a web designer because the designer, like we talked about earlier, not a lot of people are jack of all trades and can do everything. So you might be working with, with a client and a web designer, and the web designer speaking one way to you and the client speaking another way to you. And as a graphic designer, you kind of have to solve the client's problem, what they need, and solve the guy who's doing the web design and make everything work together. So if this client wants something that's got a mascot that comes off up near the top of the page, you design everything, you give it to the web designer and that head's getting cut off, you've got to be like, oh well. Then they might come back to you and say, well, it's not working on Twitter. So you really have to know what you need to do to optimize for different sites, different usage and stuff like that. Cool.

All right, I have a question. I was going to design something. One of the reasons that led me to this was I was going to get a wall covering done by my friend Lori Laser and she She mentioned vector, and I had no idea what vector was, but I knew I needed vector. I asked my old designer, and she said no, she didn't work in vector. That was what led me to Ryan, actually, which was a good thing.

Vectors are good.

What is vector?

Basically—

do you mind if I take this?

Go, Ryan. You run with this. I've got to give my voice a little break.

One of the common misconceptions that a lot of people who aren't in these fields don't really quite understand is that there are basically two types of images. There are vector images and there are raster images. Raster images are images that are pixel-based, the kind that whenever you stretch them bigger in any image editing program, they will lose color information and they will get blurry and distorted. That is what all of the graphics that you see on the web are based in. And then there's vector graphics, which are based on mathematical algorithms and things called paths, and those are for programs like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, different things. And whenever you size them bigger or smaller, they don't lose any information. They'll look exactly the same. Whenever you're getting logos or branding done that you're going to want to put on various different mediums like business cards, flyers, maybe you're going to get a wall covering like Chef wants, you're going to want to get your designer to create it in vector format because Otherwise, you are going to lose information if you put it on something big and it will look bad. A lot of people just simply don't understand that. They will see something that looks good on their computer monitor and then they take it to print and it looks all blurry. It just looks really like crap, honestly. And it's basically because they don't understand that difference. And I actually have a client right now who I'm doing a logo for him and his last logo was designed in raster format, and so he can't put it on the side of his truck or anything because it would look all pixelated and terrible. And so I do my best to educate clients on this topic because a lot of times people will say, oh, well, I want this logo to look like this photo right here. Well, you can't usually use photos or anything like that in logos unless you have an incredibly high-resolution camera.. And most people are taking pictures with their cell phone and they say, hey, I want this tree that I took a picture of to be in my logo. And it— you honestly don't want that. You might think you want that, but you really don't.

So—

that actually segues really quickly into something I wanted to say. Something you had said, Ryan, that you kind of focus on, you know, as far as what the person is like, whereas I generally go the other direction. I go for the customer.. And I've frequently had, you know, clients who are like, "Well, I don't like my logo," but they want something that's completely inappropriate for the customer base. You know, a guy that's going for senior citizens wants a futuristic, like, you know, like a Star Trek-y, like, you know, silver and shiny. And like, "No, like, yours should be like a blue, like, banking logo, like calm, you know, something trustworthy," you know, not—— but that's something to remember, is it's not always going to be something that you'll go, you know, are you a customer of your own business? That's what you have to remember, like, you need to think like the customer, but yeah, so.

I'll give you guys a quick example, hopefully you guys can see this on the webcam. Okay, say you have Adobe Photoshop and you draw a square and it's made up of all these little pixels, okay, that information when you put that down and you fill it with a color, every one of those little points, every one of those little pixels is a, is a thing of information that it has to know. And then if you scale that, it's trying to guess to make those pixels larger to make that shape larger. Now when you're dealing with something that's vector, it is 4 points if you're dealing with a square. 1, 2, 3, 4 at each corner. And what it does is you assign it a color and it remembers that math, it remembers that color code, and when you scale it up, all that's moving are these points are getting larger, and then it's filling that information in and making that square. So it'll say like, okay, this point needs to be 1 foot away from this point, away from this point, away from this point, rather than you make a square that's a foot by a foot by a foot and you're filling it with all this pixel information. All that's going into the file or You have 4 points that are this far apart, and when you get done generating those 4 points, fill it this color. Okay, so that's why vector can be scaled enormously, because you don't have to think of a lot of different— and you can get vector files that are extremely lifelike and realistic and accurate. And if you look at the— they call it the mesh mode— you'll see wireframe mode, all these shapes and everything. That you don't see normally, but it's a lot less information because it's drawing just those little points real quick and telling it to assign a color there rather than every single little pixel. I know it— some people still can't kind of follow it without seeing it, but that's a little bit—

I thought it was a great explanation.

No, it was really good. There's just— it's— there's some people that definitely still won't get that.

Yeah, we're here to educate you. Don't use gradients, people. Don't use gradients. There's also, when you're thinking about a design, a logo, think about reproduction, okay? If you're doing that banking logo like Andrew said, think about that logo on a hat, on a shirt, on a corporate event sponsored backdrop or whatever, and the reproduction of that. If you want to get this taken to a place that's going to embroider on a hat or shirt, it's got to be flat, one color, you know, so you're not making all these crazy stitches and your prices are exorbitant. Keep it simple, you know, and if you know you're going to be using this in other places, on the side of a truck or something like that, keep it simple. I'm not saying everything has to be, you know, white logo on a color with some simple type below it. But for the most part, try to think of things like that for future use and things that really kind of just come down to cleaner, simpler design rather than something that looks more complex and crazy.

It all boils down to communication as far as I see it. Whenever you see a logo, whenever you see the Nike logo, which by the way, the designer was actually paid $35 for. So that's—

what year though? That's a million dollars. Yeah, that was like—

they paid her back later, which is good. But, you know, whenever you see the Nike logo or the Apple logo, the Google logo, it's recognizable very, very quickly. And a lot of people, you know, they want something incredibly complex, but if you have something that's incredibly complex, then different people are going to get a different message whenever they see that. And you do not want that. You want people to understand, like Andrew was saying, if I'm a potential customer of your company and you have a logo that's incredibly convoluted, I have— you have a very short amount of time to convince me that I should go with you and purchase whatever it is that you're selling. And so if you have some really complex logo, like there was a restaurant in downtown Mountain View, California. My wife and I were there a couple couple weeks ago, and I found myself staring at this logo as a designer, and I was like, I couldn't read it because they tried to be all trendy with the way the letters matched with all the shapes, and I couldn't find it on Yelp because I didn't know what letters to type in. Like, that's really, really bad, and you know, it's just, it doesn't help you in the long run to have something really complex. So yeah.

Simplicity does give you a better message and it's more recognizable, it's easier to recognize, and I think it just speaks more easily to people. It's just finding that simple kind of an image.

I don't know if simple is a good word for it, maybe clean. Clean, yeah. Because I've still seen a lot of simple that are like completely creative and out of the box. It's simple, right, like Aaron was saying, it's not just a shape and text. We're not saying that. It's just, yeah, people try to cram too much into logos. They treat it— I usually say they treat it like web art instead of like a logo, whereas, you know, it's— you're not just making an image for a website or for the corner in a Word document. You know, it's your logotype. It's a different animal altogether. Here's a question from Bob.

Are infographics vector-based?

I would say 99 point— if I pulled up an infographic on are they vector-based, it would show a pie chart with a 99.9% and then maybe a 1%, 0.01% sliver, whatever. Yeah, for the most part they're vector. They're usually clean, slick-looking, you know, vector graphics. But for the most part, because they're designing them rather large Some of those things are giants. Some of them could get pieced together, of course, sliced and pieced for the web or whatever, but for the most part, it's probably a vector.

I mean, I've thrown together infographics just in raster in Photoshop, the simpler ones, but I've seen a wide range. I mean, the ones that you actually see on Google+, they're all raster because they've been converted to a JPEG. They're not vectors anymore. They may have been designed in vector, but that, yeah, you never see that.

The initial design would probably be vector-based.

But no, but yeah, I have a stock photo site, you know, for example, that I use, and they have vector packs of infographic things that I can, you know, that I can use. Because like I said, I'm less of an artist than someone like Aaron or Ryan are, so I have to use the tools that, you know, I'm stuck using the tools I have, or, you know, obviously going to my wife for for the more designy, artistry type. But yeah.

Alright, I have a question on that. What is a vector image saved as?

Vector is usually an EPS or an AI file if you're dealing with usually the base work Adobe Illustrator file. There's CorelDRAW, but for the most part EPS will get things done. It'll— you can give that to the client. It'll usually have all the information that they need to output it, but not— it'll cut out some of the information from, say, the base Illustrator file will have. But yeah, EPS is the generalized format for vector type graphics.

I just put a link in the comment stream that's a website that I will actually send to my clients to help them understand the difference, and there's some great visuals on it too.

I just yell at my client until they understand.

I say, "Why are you so stupid?" That client who wanted to lowball me for a logo, I ended up writing him a 3, you know, like a 16-paragraph letter email, you know, about how, like, why designers are paid what they are. And why your logo— his current logo is a text and WordArt. It was a WordArt and just a little, like, clipart thing. Oh, boy. This is not our hobby. And he wanted to get investments from people, thousands of dollars in his company. I was a financial investor. Like, you need to show that value. I mean, that's— Right.

Yeah, there are a lot of— yeah, go ahead.

The people that are professionals don't want to pay other professionals for their work.

Cold call. That's the thing I've discovered the most on Google+. Other professionals will not pay professionals. There are a handful and I have come across a lot of people that have come to me and said sure, but going just cold calling on people and being like, "Hey, I'd really like to work with you to redesign," it's always kind of like, "I really like my clip art. I'm not going to— yeah, let me get back to you on that." And it's the worst and these people I just want to look at them and go, "I have the perfect design for you." "Please, please work with me," but I don't want to be super pushy. I always be like, "Okay, thank you," but in the back of my mind I'm screaming like, "Why are you using this terrible clipart? Come seek out somebody that can do it for you professionally." It's because they're professionals too. They don't want to pay money. They're looking to make money off of people, so they're not letting anything else go. It's this weird kind of thing. I've seen that.

Run into it a lot as a food blogger. Your PR agency reaches out to you. And want you to do all this work for free, and my first question is, are you working for free for the company? Of course not, they just don't want to give you any of their share.

Hey Aaron, I had this idea and let me know what you think of this. To kind of illustrate this topic, I want to take like, get like a hidden camera and go into stores, you know, go into a Best Buy and say, hey guys, I want to buy this iPad, and they're like, okay, that's $500. It's like, well, you know what, that "That's a little out of my budget, but I'll tell you what, if you give it to me for $2.50, I'll tell everyone on my social media page how awesome you are." And then just kind of record their face and then go to a bunch of different stores and do that. And then at the end just have some text that's like, "You wouldn't do this anywhere else.

Please go do it." I wish we had a barter system sometimes.

Yeah, go to a restaurant and order a steak and say, "I really like that great Japanese Kobe beef, but I'll give you—" $12.50 for it.

My girlfriend and I went to a famous Chicago pizza place and we got our pizza and in the meantime I was just— they had these big placemats, I was just doodling and I drew something on one of them and the waiter came up and he brought the chef out of the back and the chef gave us a free dessert for the drawing that I did. And I was like, "Well, score!" You know, kind of like draw for your supper kind of thing. You know, I wish that we lived in a little bit more of a barter-type society sometimes. But, you know, I have bartered my services for other services. My tax consultant, I redesigned her whole look of everything and we bartered for tax services over a couple years. So, you know, it's all— you got to look at your own budget and be like, hey, can I eat this month or do I really need this money or can I get these services? At some point you kind of have to stop and say like, Well, all the mimosas in the world you're giving me on brunch on the weekends aren't going to pay to keep me going. But sometimes you can do a fair trade for something, for some consultation from them or some knowledge from them for a logo or something. It's that thing.

One question up here from Kim Vij, "What programs do you recommend using, Ryan Rhodes, for your own site?" when you want to design on your own?

Oh, I was muted, sorry. I just answered. I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Obviously not everyone is going to want to do that. It takes a long time to really learn how to get a handle on those things. There's a free version of software similar to Photoshop called GIMP you can download, and there's all kinds of tutorials for it. Obviously there are sites like PicMonkey and Canva. I'm not a big proponent of using those sites for your specific branding efforts, primarily because you're going to look like everyone else who's doing that. And, you know, you could— if you want to look like an advertisement for Canva, that's fine. That helps them out, doesn't help you out. But I, you know, I'm fine with using those sites as tools But my advice as a designer, as someone who's been doing this a long time, is if you really want to stand out, then set aside some money, put down the lattes for a couple of months, and invest in it. Because it is an investment. Look at it like that. But if you do want to go that route, there's all kinds of sites. If you just type in do-it-yourself graphic design or whatever. But understand it is an art form. It is something that takes time.—

My favorite billboard that I saw is when a DIY becomes an OMG. Yes, yes. Alright guys, well this has been a great session and we really ended this day with a bang and a lot of information and I'm very happy to have you all on and thank you very much. If you'd like to leave us with one last word of advice coming from a professional, professional. Let's do that and then we'll sign off for the day. Ryan, one last word of advice on logos or design.

Look at it like it's an investment. Look at it as this is going to be the foundation of your brand because the last thing you want to do is do something quick and on the fly just to get something out there and then you get a big following that gets used to that look and then you end up hating it because you know that you just threw it together. It looks like everyone else's logo or whatever. Make the— shame. Yeah, it's a terrible— it's hard and it's frustrating whenever you have to make those kind of decisions because then you have to rebrand everything and then people are confused about it. So look at it like it's an investment.

Absolutely. And Andrew, anything you'd like to leave us with?

Basically, if you see a price for a logo design or website design before you answer any questions, walk away. Go to someone else. It's a very personal process depending on your brand, on yourself, on what you need. I hate people that just, they just have a site that's $500 for your website. I mean, it's not like that. It's not how it works. So yeah, that's my advice.

Thank you. And Aaron, any last advice or words of wisdom?

Yeah, pay your designer on time. If they give you an invoice, you pay that. You make sure that happens. So that's my advice to people. I know that makes me sound like a jerk, but in the end, it's us getting paid. We did the work. You've got the goods. Now it's time to pay us. And I know that a lot of people are like, "Oh yeah, I'll get around to it. You gave me the logo," whatever. I'm done with you. But no, pay.

That's why, that's why I like doing web design. We cover their hosting as well. So if someone doesn't want to pay us, pull the plug.

Yeah. Awesome, guys. It's been fun. Thank you so much for being here today.

And we had a lot of good questions, and I know we're going to get a lot more people watching after the fact because it is Saturday night. So, but thanks for stopping by, and we'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock as we start the second annual Virtual Bloggers Conference, second day of shows, and we'll have 5 4DMRs starting at 10 AM. So thanks for coming by, and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.