sysadminman.net

I have no shame in admitting that my graphic design skills are pretty poor!

When I needed a logo for my new system administration company I first had a go at designing it myself and really didn’t like the results. So, time to get a professional in.

I had heard about elance before - elance.com is a website where you can employ all kinds of freelance professionals for one off jobs. There are programmers, graphic artists, accountants, lawyers … I signed up and paid my $10 (refundable) deposit and started to have a look at what, and how, other people were asking for logos.

You basically create a “Project” that details all of your requirements. As I found out later on it pays to be quite specific when you are drawing up your requirements. Instead of just saying “Logo wanted …”, I had a pretty good idea what I wanted and tried to describe it as best as I could.

You chose how many days you want to allow for people to bid on your work and then you post it up there.

I received a total of 19 bids in just 2 days ranging from $50 to $350! It is possible to check out the bidder’s portfolio of previous work on the elance site to get an idea of what they have done previously. Now for the benefit of describing what you want in your project description - about 3 or 4 of the bidders actually designed me some logos and sent them to me without me having to select them as the winning bidder. I’m guessing it is the newer freelancers that tend to do this - trying to build themselves a reputation.

Some of the designs were pretty poor but one of them I really liked so I decided to give them a go. The bid was $75 which I deposited into my elance account. This was then held in escrow until I was happy with the work. I suggested a few adjustments to the logo which were made quickly and e-mailed back to me for proofing. Once I was happy I released the funds and received the logo in several different formats (gif, pdf, eps, jpg, png).

The whole process only took about 4 days - really impressive. You obviously have to try to be as careful as you can and check out who you are dealing with.

Elance have a feedback system and you can see how much the freelancer has earned through elance before.

Overall I was really impressed and would definitely do it again.

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