Cheap graphic design

Can you save on graphic design? Of course you can, but is it worth it?

Logo, business card, leaflet, advertising folder, billboard, website – these are just a few of the company’s many promotional and corporate identity tools. Ordering them will incur costs. You still have a lot of other expenses on your mind, so you try to save. Are you wondering what? Your choice falls on graphic designs. Why exactly for them? Because checking the offers of various advertising agencies and freelancers you see huge price spreads, so why not choose the cheapest offer ?! You decide to use this option.

Low price logo design

You find a good offer online. You order a logo at a very low, super bargain price. After all, you’ve seen so many good logo designs from different brands, so it’s definitely not that difficult, and it certainly doesn’t have to cost a lot. The effect – the logo is so bad that you can’t use it in your visual identity.

Why is this happening? The answer is simple – probably someone who prepared it, did not have adequate experience and devoted too little time to it. If the logo cost about PLN 100, it probably took a maximum of one hour to make it. This is definitely not enough (there are also advertisements in which you have up to 3 project proposals for PLN 100 !!!). Can you? You can. But should this not arouse your suspicions?

A well-designed logo is years of practice and appropriate knowledge of the graphic designer and, above all, the right amount of time spent in preparing several proposals for the mark. The logo must be thought out both conceptually and designally. It can’t be done quickly and cheaply. So it’s not even worth looking for offers that tempt you with their low prices. Low price will never be equal to good quality. So it will simply be money thrown down the drain.

And only in the best case it will be only a waste of money. If you decide to use a logo that cost you little, it may happen that it soon turns out to be a plagiarism of a third-party logo, or worse, a plagiarism of a company logo from a completely different or even controversial industry. If this is noticed, it will be hard for others to forget about it later. Such a situation can seriously affect your company’s image. And this can’t be easily repaired. Is it worth risking when ordering a logo graphic design at a low price?

You may also find that your logo is almost identical to the logo of many companies in the same industry. See the examples below. How will you stand out among the competition then? The logo is the element of visual identity which, although inconspicuous, does a really good promotional “job”. So invest in them and avoid the “low price graphic design logo” offers.

Low price of flyer, folder, billboard design

Or maybe you need a leaflet informing about the services offered by your company? You think that preparing it is nothing complicated and time-consuming – a logo, a few graphics, quickly written text and it’s ready! So you take advantage of the offer of the first better agency that offers a ready project the next day. Sensational. You print a large number of leaflets and wait impatiently for new customers. They do not appear, however. Something went wrong. But what could it be?

The leaflet, although one of the most common information carriers about the company, also has the largest design requirements for its implementation. It must make everyone who receives it interested in what is on it, and for that you need the right graphics and the concept of its arrangement on the leaflet. The design must also comply with all of your company’s visual identity. It can’t be worked out quickly, cheaply.

Besides, graphics alone are not everything. Also important are the texts you put on the leaflet. They cannot be imaginary sentences or slogans. They must be well thought out, and preferably consulted with an advertising agency, which will prepare content proposals in line with the company’s strategy or in line with the intended effect of the designed leaflet. Only such an approach to the topic can bring the expected positive results, but to achieve it, you need the necessary time and funds to invest in this form of promotion. A good leaflet can for a long time become a good source of information about your business, so it’s not worth saving on it.

The situation is similar in the case of advertising folders or billboards. Only the information carrier is different. The right message is associated with the right amount of time spent on their design, and this is never equal to a low price.

At a low price you can only receive a cluster of illegible information that will not bring you fame, and above all an increase in the number of customers. Such projects do not attract attention or do not contain data relevant to customers, so is it worth being interested in announcing “graphic designs for posters, billboards at a low price”?

Low price of the website design

You’ve just come across an offer to create a website at a great bargain price. In the portfolio of the company that makes them, you find quite nice graphic designs. For sure they will also find the right creation for your company’s website. The site must, after all, look good. So you order it. It just hit the search engines, but there are no more customers. Why?

Probably the price of a “cheaper” site is only its correct graphic design (if you’re lucky). These days is not enough. The sales page must be prepared for the user’s expectations and retention on it, so that it has the effect of buying goods or using the service of your company. If you want it to have an informative role, you need to make it remember your client and make him establish an emotional bond with your brand. This cannot be done only with aesthetic graphics.

Surrounded by such a large number of competing sites, often very similar to each other, it is not enough just to own the website itself, it must stand out! Stand out not only with graphics, but also with what it has “inside”. To do this, it is necessary to work on the project of professionals from various fields such as a copywriter, programmer, usability specialist or e-marketing. They must “embody” your client’s company, predict his behavior, expectations – step by step prepare the path of his presence on the website and plan it so that he feels good on it, which will lead to the effects you want to achieve. Each page on which the customer will not find the basic information they are looking for, such as contact or product description that interests him, will be the page he never returns to. Every detail is important. Make sure of it yourself or with the help of a reliable contractor.

Also remember that once a website is designed, it will have to change constantly. Good graphic designers and programmers know this, so they create them so that changes can take place on the one that has already been created, without having to design a new page, which is associated with further costs that you want to avoid.

Already at the stage of searching for the contractor, you must necessarily think about the responsiveness of the website and its mobile version. The statistics speak for themselves – websites are viewed more often on telephones than on computers. Don’t be fooled by offers that don’t include it in their pricing. Without the mobile version, your business can lose a huge number of customers.

There are a lot of graphic design offers on the market at a low price and prepared in a short time or on publicly available templates, but these are pages whose identical versions you will probably find plenty in the whole network. As a matter of fact, you might not pay the graphic designer who issues such an ad, but rather buy the template yourself and learn how to enter content into it.

The situation may get worse if the site is a copy that is covered by copyright, which you may not know by receiving its design from a company tempting with bargain prices. Unfortunately, this ends in court and involves payment of damages. Such information quickly appears on the network and does not disappear from it. If customers find them, they won’t trust your brand.

When ordering websites, it is worth mentioning programming work. They are not included in the price of offers that promise cheap cost, which you are not always informed about in the advertisement. A good website is not only time devoted to its graphics, but also a lot of time devoted to its proper coding, i.e. preparation from the inside. Something we see at first glance requires the creation of appropriate mechanisms that are hidden, but important and without them the site may not work well. We often meet with the opinion of customers that a small change they want to make on the site does not require a lot of work and time. From the programmer’s point of view, it looks completely different. As a rule, each change requires necessary corrections in the code.

If you decide to create a website, be sure to check the loading time. The longer it does, the worse will be its position in the search engine. Works on improving this process are also on the side of the programmer and require appropriate time.

A properly prepared site for publication also requires testing and checking whether it opens properly in all web browsers. Business owners often forget about it, and this is an important part of getting website visitors. If the site does not open at all or opens incorrectly, the customer will not return to it, but will start looking for another one. This is a big loss for your company.

The next element is the page code well prepared by the programmer. Thanks to this, every subsequent person who will modify it will be able to find their place on it, i.e. make the necessary changes. If you add the developed documentation to it, you can be confident that the website will be “embraced” for each subsequent programmer without having to re-create it and generate costs.

Finally, necessary access to statistics and security. You may not remember it, but for a trustworthy subcontractor it is the basis. Appropriate configuration of Google Analitics and preventing your site from containing viruses and your emails falling into clients’ SPAM mailboxes must be found in every order. It must also take care of all necessary elements, such as ftp and url addresses, which are important for well-functioning websites.

A website is not just a graphic design. If you see an offer for a cheap website, know that you will either receive the same questionable quality graphics (see below), or its other elements will be hidden costs that you will have to bear anyway. In the worst situation, you won’t receive proper programming support and the site will be useless. the end I will remind you again the question asked at the beginning – Can you save on graphic design? Of course you can, but is it worth it?

I hope that after reading this text, a few examples of projects shown in it will never become an “advertisement” of your company. They are rather examples of the outstanding “anti-advertising”.

If you need a logo, website, billboard, leaflet, etc. don’t be afraid to call, ask, consult … Any good advertising agency applies the principle of individual quotes depending on the specifics of the query received. Not every advertising agency has the same prices as the others. Contact is the best way to find out and not to worry about high costs in advance, and, above all, it will not let you fall into the trap of offers “graphic designs at low prices”.