What’s in a logo?
More and more people with significant commercial skills are setting up small businesses. This is to some extent a result of the boom in business-oriented internet services, such as affordable payment systems (PayPal, NoChex, etc — see here for a listing), and to some extent a result of the health boom where retirees can look forward to ten or even twenty years of active life. Relatively cheap access to wide markets and low start-up costs make a small business more attractive to the risk-averse — which includes many former senior executives in large companies — and reduces the requirement to turn a tidy profit. The traditional aspiration was for a one-man venture to grow into something larger. In the current climate, many ‘micro-businesses’ are not one man, but half-man or 1/10th man, with an aspiration to grow profit rather than volume of trade.
One area in which neither the personal computer nor internet services has had much to offer, however, is that of the business logo. It’s true that anyone can buy Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw and have a go, or surf the net for budget alternatives, but a hard-headed business person is unlikely to want to spend so much on what is (for them) a one-trick pony, and probably shrewdly recognises that there is a lot more to logo design than simply owning the relevant software.
To the rescue — perhaps — then, comes an application priced to sell which makes just one claim: the creation of that elusive logo. The Logo Creator, now in version 5 for both Mac and Windows, claims: “Create incredible logo designs that look like a Photoshop guru spent hours laboring over! It’s like having your own logo design studio… without the studio! With The Logo Maker - you’ll get a portfolio full of logos that you can modify and customize yourself… for far less than what a designer will charge.”
So is this the answer to this perplexing pre-business problem, or does it follow the pattern of many things which seem too good to be true?
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