This is how disruption works. Fiverr are doing to the graphic design industry <i>exactly</i> the sort of disruption that many of the startups we admire have been doing in other sectors for years - vastly reducing the price to the end user by using software to connect them with the lowest cost supplier. Exactly as the taxi industry decries Uber saying UberX isn't as professional or safe or fast, the design people are saying that the user is getting a raw deal as the product they buy is demonstrably inferior, stolen, ill-thought and slow. Just as Google did to advertising, Youtube did for television, Spotify did for music, and AirBNB did for hotels.<p>The incumbents all said the upstarts offered a worse service while failing to understand that there are huge numbers of people that don't want, or care about, the 'essential' qualities that the incumbents insist on selling. Disruption is made possible where an industry charges for things that represent no value to the customer. In the case of Fiverr, fortunately I think, their customers are people who want a logo that's better than what they can make themselves but without the bells and whistles like rounds of design changes, high quality vector artwork and Pantone reference colours. Designers think they need to charge for those things. They are wrong. Lots of customers are quite happy taking what they're given if the price is low enough.<p>And one day this <i>will</i> come to the software industry. Someone <i>will</i> make a service that enables businesses to build applications for $5. Apps that work, that scale, and that are 'good enough' not to need a developer any more. We will have to change the way we sell what we do, just as Fiverr is going to make designers have to think about the way they sell their services now.
Apparently the work wasn't really stolen- it was a stock design that was (presumably) paid for. I would not call it a rip-off, and would ask "what about fiver makes people think they are going to get completely original designs?" If fiver (or their designers) are indeed somehow misleading customers into thinking their design is completely original, with no stock art involved, that is a problem- but it seems clear to me that for 5 bucks that you would be starting from stock.
I'm confused. How is using a stock template a "rip-off"? If you design something with a stock photo, is your entire design a rip-off? If you use a popular library such as Bootstrap, is your site a rip-off? It's lazy, sure. But you honestly weren't expecting anything else.<p>>There’s nothing wrong with going with a cheaper freelancer instead of hiring an expensive agency, just like there’s nothing wrong with choosing McDonalds over a 3-star restaurant.<p>Totally, but this is like reviewing an egg mcfuffin and being disappointed they didn't serve you pastured eggs. There's a disclaimer near the beginning of the article about a potential conflict of interest. When I first read it, I blew it off thinking "oh that's not necessary, this is just a bit of fun." In hindsight, the article reads like an ad. I was expecting a little more from the tag line "An epic tale of deception, stolen artwork, and crappy logos."
To add a related experience, but with different results... some months ago I used 99designs to get a cover for my novel. It wasn't $5 but $300, but still, I was amazed by the quality of [some of] the entries - 126 in total! See here: <a href="https://99designs.com/book-cover-design/contests/book-cover-action-thriller-novel-golden-seed-277703" rel="nofollow">https://99designs.com/book-cover-design/contests/book-cover-...</a> In this case the freelancers were <i>required</i> to disclose the licenses of the assets they used, and even provide the sources so I could verify them.<p>I understand why some artists complain about sites like these, but for a "consumer" like me it's a fantastic idea - and as another commenter said, "disruption". They do other things, like UI design and so on... check them out. FWIW, I'm in no way affiliated to 99designs, I just had a good experience with them.
Then, at the other end of the scale, you have 'What kind of logo do you get for several million dollars?'<p>Aka, the Pepsi Gravitation Field:<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/daxp/downloads/detail?name=pepsi%20gravitational%20field.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/daxp/downloads/detail?name=pepsi%2...</a><p>Where their logo redesign was pumped up by a fantastic amount of tenuous justifications and logic.
I always ask clients if they would go with a $5 plumber, or a $5 bus driver for their kids. Always the response is, "No!" So it's a matter of them not being able to judge quality of tech / design work... not just them being cheap. Any small business is going to want to pinch pennies, but if you know they make irrational decisions you should just walk away.<p>The cure, I think, is for our industry to develop non-subjective ways of saying, "I'm a level 60 Developer spec'd for RoR," or, "Designer with .333 Batting Average stepping up to the plate." So customers can compare apples to apples when looking at the billable rate.<p>If you think $5 logos are the only ones who plagiarize; I've seen this from people who charge $150 / hour too. It's still very much the wild wild west and the likelihood of someone getting ripped off doesn't seem to change no matter how much the service provider charges.
I got my company's logo on Fiverr and wrote about the experience a couple years ago. Quite happy with the result honestly. It offended a lot of people then (feel free to read the comments), and probably still does today. But I've heard designers at $100+/hr down to Fiverr and they serve different purposes. I've been happy with both and disappointed in both types (and everything in between). I wouldn't hesitate to give it a shot though, it's so cheap you're not really losing much budget if you have to go another direction.<p><a href="http://kevinohashi.com/26/10/2012/how-get-logo-30" rel="nofollow">http://kevinohashi.com/26/10/2012/how-get-logo-30</a>
They should have tried <a href="http://www.horriblelogos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.horriblelogos.com/</a> - $5 for a hand-drawn logo, so no stock artwork involved.<p>(Logo will still suck though :)
"Yet it also seemed too good to be true: how on earth could anybody make a living creating logos for $5?"<p>$5 is 3x minimum hourly wage in Poland. And you can create more than one logo in three hours.
Neat experiment. Buying design through places like Fiverr is a hard proposition (unlike, say, voice over or something) because faking and fraud is so easy. But let's not pretend this is relegated to things like Fiverr.<p>I've paid pretty good money for web design work before only to find out later it was recycled or stolen from an open source project, grabbed off ThemeForest and re-colored, or straight copied and pasted off someone else's website. I worked with a startup that hired through a High Class™ marketplace for a lot of dough and they ended up with a logo that the designers eventually admitted was "heavily inspired" by another popular logo.<p>Just because you pay more doesn't mean you get a more honest vendor.
Author here. Just to address the point that just because these logos are based on stock templates, doesn't mean they are rip-offs:<p>1. If you read the original article, you'll see that the second designer assured me in writing that their artwork was original (I had my doubts so I asked).<p>2. Most stock template's terms of use explicitly forbid using them as logos (presumably to avoid legal issues).<p>3. At no point in the process was any hint given that the logo would not be original artwork. Here's the blurb from the logo designer's page:<p>> I will design a killer, high-quality, effective and custom-made logo for your website, company or business.<p>And I may be mistaken, but the word "logo" itself carries connotations of uniqueness to me.
$5? At $50/hr that's about 6 minutes; at $30 an hour that's 10 minutes. Barely enough time to load up a stock file, slap some text on it in Illustrator, make some default gradients, and call it a day. And that's exactly what you get.<p>Cheap things are cheap because 1) they take very little materials/labor to make, or 2) they cost a lot to make, but there's a lot of it and the cost is spread over many duplicates.<p>In this case, you're getting the latter, obviously. And you get what you pay for. I'd say, if you're the kind of person who thinks paying for a $5 logo or $300 logo is good enough, you might as well learn Illustrator yourself and whip something easy out, since it will satisfy your two constraints: 1) it's cheap/free, and 2) it looks okay to you but not to anyone else, but that's fine, because the $5 logo would have performed the same role anyways.<p>This is like asking: "What kind of branding do you get for $5?" "What kind of a PR rep do you get for $5?" Etc, etc.
This reminds me a lot of sound effects in video games. At the high end you can hire a sound designer to do custom foley/SFX. For a small game, maybe $1-5k. Midrange, you can hire a sound designer with extensive knowledge to pick royalty-free sounds for you (maybe $250). On the cheap, you can browse through SFX libraries yourself and pick out what you want and pay per-effect (maybe $20-$50 worth). Ditto for music.<p>It's kind of a spectrum of "custom-for-you" to "off-the-shelf" AND a separate spectrum of "no-effort" (picking) to "put-in-a-lot-of-time-and-effort" (doing your own shopping).<p>None of these are "wrong" or "stealing" -- in this analogy Fiverr isn't even the "cheapest" option (the author could put in some time and browse royalty-free templates on their own). It seems like more a sign of a mature market with too much inventory than anything shady.
I have used the first designer's work and he did a pretty good job for the grand sum of $5. I think he's a design student, so it's a pretty good gig for him (especially because he lives in a low-cost country). I sent him a stock image that I liked and he made a similar design. No complaints from me!
The larger issue here is that it's common and expected to have to trademark a logo, so if you're ever going to need to do that a logo made with stock art may be problematic.<p>Other than that I'm a big believer in asset stores, stock art, etc. Especially for prototyping.
So the actual logo for his site is the word "Folyo" in a circle. <a href="http://assets1.folyo.me/assets/logo-white-41e8dee74424daa4600dbbe8f1222a56.png" rel="nofollow">http://assets1.folyo.me/assets/logo-white-41e8dee74424daa460...</a><p>Is this an original design?<p>If I spent $20 on Fiverr could I find a designer who could go on 123rf.com or another stock site, get a vector image, adapt it, and make a better logo that would be a less typical design?<p>How much did he actually pay for that logo? I assume it was quite a lot, given the context.
Reminds me of “The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment” (<a href="http://www.logodesignlove.com/the-50-dollar-logo-experiment" rel="nofollow">http://www.logodesignlove.com/the-50-dollar-logo-experiment</a>). Sometimes $50 isn’t worth it either.
I used this guy a year and a half ago: <a href="http://www.vonglitschka.com/5MinuteLogo/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.vonglitschka.com/5MinuteLogo/index.html</a><p>Loved the result. 5 USD for that kind of talent. Unbelievable.
I used Fiverr to design logos for most of the "future-proof" business ideas at StartJumper: <a href="http://startjumper.com" rel="nofollow">http://startjumper.com</a> (a side project of mine).<p>There are three that were "professionally" designed and not by Fiverr. Can you tell which ones?