WHAT THINGS COST
How much does a logo and brand identity cost?
Why the logo is the cheap part, and what the rest of the money is for.
Short answer
A complete identity - mark and lockups, a type and colour system, written usage guidelines and an asset pack in every format - costs $1,200 and takes two weeks. A logo on its own is cheaper everywhere and worth less than it looks.
A logo is not an identity
A logo is one mark. An identity is the system that keeps everything you make afterwards looking like it came from the same place: the typography, the colour, the spacing, and the rules for when to break them. Without the system, six months of work by four different people produces six slightly different companies.
This is the single most common thing we are asked to fix, and fixing it costs more than doing it once.
What the two weeks contain
A brief, then a small number of genuinely different directions rather than forty variations of one idea. Showing twenty near-identical options is a way of making the client do the deciding, and the client usually picks the third-best one.
The chosen direction is then built out into a system and written down. The guidelines are the part that stops the identity decaying, and they are the part most cheap identity work leaves out.
What is not included
Trademark search and registration. That is a legal matter, it varies by jurisdiction, and it should be handled by someone qualified rather than bundled into a design fee.
Also excluded: packaging, print production artwork, signage, and naming. If you need the name itself rather than the mark for a name you have, that is a separate job and we will quote it.
Why identity prices vary so wildly
At the bottom, a marketplace logo is a stock mark resold to several businesses, and you will meet one of them. At the top, an identity programme for a large organisation includes research, naming, several sub-brands and a rollout across hundreds of touchpoints, and it genuinely costs what it costs.
In the middle, the honest question is whether you are buying a mark or a system. Ask to see the guidelines document from a previous project. If there is not one, you are buying a mark.
What moves the number
- Pushes it up
- Naming, several sub-brands, packaging or print artwork, research
- Pushes it down
- Nothing useful. Below this, you are buying a stock mark
- Separate and unavoidable
- Trademark registration, and commercial font licences
The packages behind these numbers
Each one lists its full scope, what it excludes and how the work runs.