Taking your own advice
Sometimes the best thing you could do is to look at yourself in the mirror and take your own advice. I was once again made aware of this fact just this week. After writing an article only last week entitled Just because you can doesn’t mean you should I completely ignored that advice and wasted a good chunk of a weekend. I was working on a website, this one actually, and I needed a logo for it. The logo was something we knew we needed but hadn’t quite got to yet but it was becoming urgent now.
My wife Helen, who has quite a good eye for design, mocked something up for me that looked pretty good in Word and emailed it to me. Being the “I can do that” type of guy that I am I immediately decided to open up Photoshop and have a go at creating a proper logo from her rough draft. This ended up taking me most of the rest of that day, but I was pretty happy with the outcome. Until the next day that is.
Looking at it again the next day I wasn’t quite as happy with it as I was at first. Some bits didn’t quite look right, I wasn’t sure about the font and some of the colours could have been better. So what do you think I did? That’s right, I spent another whole afternoon on it but this time I was quite sure I’d got it by the time I went to bed.
Just like the day before I again woke to look at it with fresh eyes and I still wasn’t happy with it. To be honest, it had this look about it that screamed “home-made by a non-artist”. It just didn’t quite look professional and wasn’t going to do at all.
This time though, I did what I should have done in the first place. I went to fiverr.com and found a graphic artist who had done some logo’s similar to what I wanted. For the princely sum of $20 I had a professional looking logo in a variety of formats & sizes, all done in 48 hours! I can tell you I was back again the next day to have a facebook page cover & twitter page cover made as well. I wasn’t making that mistake again.
In all seriousness, there are a million jobs that can be done professionally and quite cheaply now through sites like fiverr.com and freelancer.com that it really doesn’t pay to spend your own time turning out a “home-made” effort. Get the professionals in first up and save both time and money.