jimleff.blogspot.com
My last logo job had about a hundred sketches, further refined to a dozen candidates, from which I presented the top three. The idea that an artist/designer/musician can't be called upon to think up fresh ideas is laughable. Any truly competent creative can pump out ideas a fast as they can draw/write/play.
It's not the act of having an idea that's bad. What's bad is when the expectation, spoken or (worse) unspoken, is not that the client's ideas are the starting point for a conversation between the two of you, but that you're going to do what this article suggests and just "polish up" the client's idea verbatim. That is, with nearly nonexistent exception, a road straight to horrible design town.
Just like how good programmers aren't just "good at computers," or "good at math," or whatever, good designers aren't just "good at drawing." Like good programmers, good designers are good problem solvers. (The problems they solve are just different.) Most good designers I know relish solving problems and coming up with unexpected or interesting or clean and efficient solutions to challenges as much as (if not more than) they enjoy the actual act of putting pen to paper (or hand to mouse). Obviously a good designer should be someone who produces aesthetically pleasing work, but that's not all they do, at least not if they're good!
If you're not letting your designer help you solve your problems, you might be under utilizing your designer. If your designer isn't helping you solve your problems, you might have a bad designer.
The follow-up question than is: is 'being creative' a required skill for a designer. I venture: no. As the author points out, the sketches and ideas of the client can convey a lot of information about his business: not only factual information, but also the harder-to-express features that distinguish a business from others. It may very well be enough starting material for someone with less creative skill to produce an excellent design, completely covering what the client had in mind, while including all possible designer finesses. Of course, everyone has some creative skill and some may very well be enough.
The very best can come up with original ideas out of thin air. We respect that and strive towards that ability. However, that does not mean that those that cannot do that are immediately demoted to 'hack' status. That would denounce many great artists and thinkers as 'hacks', because they were only capable of executing ideas to perfection, while not being able to come up with those ideas themselves.
Ask around, get recommendations, look at their portfolios and talk to them about their methods and processes.
Getting recommendations from people is the best thing to do, but people are much more likely to need a dentist or an electrician then a writer or musician for something. So solid recommendations may be slightly harder to get.
I imagine coming to a designer with a design and asking just, ya know, snazz it up a bit is like coming to a developer for a fault tolerant, scalable to hundreds of machines, transactional message system and saying "Hey, we got all these win98 and MS Access licenses so just ya know use those. I hear there's a wizard in Access that makes it practically automatic."
Designers, musicians, and others make a living at their craft because they're good at what they do (ideally). Logo designers have spent hours learning what's good and what isn't.
I wouldn't want someone who has a "compositional idea" to come up to me (as a piano player myself) and ask me to morph their idea into a masterpiece unless they fully understood that I might change their idea entirely, or that their idea might not even be feasible.
Same goes for startups -- you can't present an idea to a few developers and expect them to roar back with a great startup. It takes persistence, experience, and inspiration to create something good. But inspiration itself comes from having experience at a craft. Not all inspiration is created equal.
Designers are good at playing with visuals, writers are good at playing with words, musicians are good at setting harmony to a melody. Sometimes, those people are good at creating something from nothing, but it's a different animal.
Having worked as a writer, I liked starting from scratch, but I also appreciated when the CEO had a clear vision and story of what his company was about that I could run with. Many great works of music are derivative of a theme from another composer.
Jim's point seems to be that giving them something to react to and work with is a huge shortcut with little or no loss.
That's what brainstorming is all about -- creating ideas without having any expectation that any particular idea will succeed. Starting with something might spur an idea forward, or it might not. An initial idea's good; multiple ideas are better. As long as the person understands that collaborating with an expert will necessitate change, perhaps back-and-forth consultation, etc., until a good, agreeable conclusion is reached.
He adresses the quality of the current logo in a comment, in reply to an anonymous commenter who said something along the same lines (but much more rudely).
"Nope, wasn't "implying" that! In fact, a careful read would have indicated the Chowhound logo was NOT created according to this advice. It was, in fact, done by a pro with vast experience, "condensation" or not.
"You clearly have no idea what a graphic designer does"
Well, hmm. Actually, you, like many (though by no means all) graphic designers, have no idea what a graphic designer ought to do. I'll explain:
The function of graphics for commercial use is not to impress graphics people. Its purpose is to set a tone and demarcate a brand for a given market. Chowhound reached nearly a million people and became a nationally-known brand with a marketing budget of exactly zero. A great many people grew emotionally attached to the brand as soon as they came through our door, and identified with it quite strongly.
All along, graphics pros such as yourself denigrated our design (totally their right, of course!). But I'd say the design was awesome....not to impress the likes of you, but to accomplish our goal: to attract and engage a vast number of eaters of a certain stripe. THAT'S what a (good) graphic designer does. A bad designer designs to please other designers."
I'm sure it pisses off $5000/logo designers as much as iStockphoto pisses off people that used to make a good living from stock photography, but welcome to the 21st century.
Should you ever get caught with a logo using stolen works, you're setting yourself up for some really hefty fees regardless of where you obtained the work. This isn't conjecture, it's happened before:
http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/anti-spec-...
As the article hints, it's a problem of economics. With spec work, the artist only gets paid on a few works out of many. To make many works and still earn a living wage, the artist must make each work with a fraction of the resources usually allocated to a professional work -- which on average can't compete with stolen works produced with more resources.
If spec work paid more, real artists might be able to compete -- but the only reason people want spec work is because it is cheaper... in the short term at least.
"Nope, wasn't "implying" that! In fact, a careful read would have indicated the Chowhound logo was NOT created according to this advice. It was, in fact, done by a pro with vast experience, "condensation" or not."
It can't. There are too many fine details. This is an incredibly common rookie mistake. If you're having a logo done, just think to yourself: would this logo work as well on the spine of a CD cover as it would on a billboard? Someday you will need to print your logo somewhere small.
Apple logo, Nike swoosh, facebook's "f", twitter's "t", etc. - Recognizeable at any size.
Also ask, would this logo work just as well in 2-color? Because you'll be printing it that way all the time, on invoices, etc.
One logo might look OK on a printout, but imagine being in an office where nearly everything has that logo? The two Squiggly lines had space around them and stood out. Anything meatier and we would have gone nuts. Looked gorgeous on their custom lamps too; they had reading lamps made of a murky glass bowl, except the logo area was see through. The whole thing just looked pro.
I am constantly baffled by designers and developers not understanding or appreciating each others craft.