When a Client is just a Client.

I have recently wanted to do logos again, the expectancy and landscape of branding beckons. Small businesses are buying logos and not understanding how much they should know, how much their investment matters, and how helpful and involved they can be. Small businesses everywhere are buying into logo mills. It is now possible to go to, say,  Elance, perhaps the largest of global freelance sites and put a budget of “under $500″ on your logo or entire company branding project or website design. Fifty dollars is the lowest permissible bid, and “design” companies flock to join hundreds of bottom feeders trying to win the gig. Thousands of  designers from Argentina, India, Pakistan, Russia, happy to take it on, limitless free revisions, open 24/7. The internet has not so much opened up cheap design to western customers as it has opened a global marketplace to cheap designers previously confined to their local markets. As Seth Godin points out, if you rely on numbers alone, you get deniability. Blind bidding means you don’t have to care about anything but price. An RFP means you don’t have to compare apples and oranges. Anonymous business clients means you don’t have to answer the phone. Follow up is bound to be like a bad or dropped cell connection, understanding of foreign client culture is simply not possible for fifty or a hundred dollars. It is a blatant rip-off to call it branding, the exercise everyone wants without knowing what it is. I might mention Elance is a $270 million business and there are others …  This is a new and serious consideration for committed designers. If we are educating clients or teaching students, mention this market early on.