TL;DR - Sometimes you need an actual professional. Fiverr gets you in touch with (literally) thousands of them. If you manage to filter out the waves of copy-paste reactions, you will end up getting EXACTLY what you wished for.
I create apps for Android and iOS, which I mostly do for a hobby. I get to create and fix things that appear on screen like magic and with the technology ever evolving, I keep learning and progressing. It makes me happy.
I've been using my old plotsklapps logo and icon for some time now. I created them using some online logo creator, clicked 'okay' and boom, started uploading them to wherever and whenever.
But, as you can imagine, when you're hobby/business starts to interest people in general or even attract actual customers, you might want to rethink it. Reshape it. Pull it into the present.
My logo was just my company name with a colon in front (a subtle hint to coding)
and when I took the colon and the P apart it would make a smileyface for an icon/avatar. Smart, right? Easy-peasy, bold font, black-and-white and DONE.
Boring, though.
So I went looking for someone that could help me and I could remember a colleague once mentioning Fiverr for this type of stuff. Created an account, typed out my first request, entered a budget and dayum, what happened next is the reason I'm typing this blog right now.
YOU NEED TO PRESS PAUSE AND FILTER.
There will be an enormous amount of offers from ALL over the world. In my case especially Pakistan and India.
'Very Honorable Sir, I Took My Time To Understand Your Design Brief...'
NO YOU DIDN'T.
Please, for heaven's sake, I took my time to write about my problem. I added screenshots, I told about the origin of my company name, I thought about what I want and how I want it and was very specific in my request.
You should take your time to answer me.
In my case, I received over a 100 offers within 2 hours before I paused the request, some from 'different' accounts but with exactly the same copy and paste answer. Just ridiculous and plain annoying. Out of ALL THESE OFFERS, I received 4 (!) offers that actually took the two minutes to read my request and respond with some details in it. None of them from Pakistan or India.
So that's the 'bad' part of Fiverr. There's a lot of noise. Too much if you ask me and Fiverr could maybe even warn some of the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V users? They bring NO value.
But now the good part. Once you made a connection with the person that took his/her time to sincerely think about your request he or she can draw some ideas on paper. Literally. Check out the header of this blog. Chad, the dude from South Africa that had the nicest response to my request, sent this just hours later.
Now it was my turn and I browsed the internet for an hour and just right-clicked on the stuff that caught my eye:
And then the magic starts. It's a game of ping-pong. Once you feel you've made a connection, you accept the designer's offer and lean back. The designer sends you his ideas, you place your remarks in browser, send it back and off the designer goes again. This is what I started to love about Fiverr. It's insanely fast and intuïtive, there's a high level of teamwork created between two people that have never met before and never will, because there are 13.000 kilometers between them. The communication about the design will look like this:
You will put pink dots in the design and write your remarks. The designer will pick it up and adjust accordingly or just completely pull you out of your comfortzone by doing something slightly different (which I loved about Chad).
Three days later (although I had a 30 day schedule), I received the final project files, 100% to my liking. You can see the results on my website, apps and socials and I'm very pleased.
I will definitely return to Fiverr when I need something created that I shouldn't create myself. There are professionals out there that can do a 1000x better job than you ever could yourself. And the good part? It cost me less than I had budgeted. Glad Fiverr brought me Chad.