What the market charges for logos

At the bottom end sit Canva and the logo generator apps. Costs here are free to about £90. You'll receive a template with light customisation and a couple of file types. You won’t get any strategy or advice, and with Canva's templates, no ownership of the mark you've chosen either.

Also at the £0 point are logos created using AI tools. ChatGPT and its rivals will produce a logo from a written prompt in seconds. The results can look appealing on screen, but they’ll cause problems everywhere else. What comes back is a low-resolution image rather than the vector artwork a printer needs, so it can't be scaled, separated into spot colours or embroidered.

These designs tend to be far too detailed for a mark that has to work at 16 pixels on a browser tab as well as two metres wide on an exhibition stand.

Trademark protection is a bigger issue. A mark generated this way is unlikely to be registrable, since you can't demonstrate human authorship and you have no way of knowing how close the output sits to a design somebody else already owns.

Moving upwards, crowdsourcing platforms such as Fiverr, 99designs and Upwork run from around £50 to £400. You post a brief and pick from the submissions. Work arrives quickly, prices are low, but originality is difficult to verify.

A step up from that – a junior freelancer or recent design graduate charges £330 to £600 for one or two concepts and a basic set of files. Print experience tends to be thin at this level, which can cause issues later, when the design that looked sharp on Instagram falls apart on a van livery or an embroidered polo shirt.

Beyond that, an experienced freelance designer charges £660 to £1,500. You should receive more concepts, proper refinement, files that work everywhere, and someone who will tell you when the colour you asked for already belongs to your nearest competitor.

Finally, agencies and branding consultants start around £1,500 and climb past £5,500. What agencies sell at that price is brand identity rather than a logo.

So why the big jump in cost?

A logo is a small part of a bigger picture

A logo is a mark. A brand identity scheme is the encompassing system that mark sits inside: colours, typefaces, the style of photography you use, tone of voice, the templates your team works from, and a set of rules that keeps everything consistent when you ask other people to design something for you.

Most people asking what a logo costs are asking about the mark, because the mark is the bit you can picture. The mark, though, is the smallest part of the job, and on its own it can't do very much. A logo can't make a proposal document look like it came from the same business as the website.

How to tell which one you need

The difference matters as soon as you involve someone other than you in producing your marketing. When you're the only pair of hands, consistency is fairly easy. Add an office manager who builds the newsletter and a printer who creates the exhibition banner, and inconsistencies start to appear.

What strategic brand design costs

My branding work starts at £2,450.

Every project opens with strategy, discovery and market research to pin down who you serve, what you promise them and where you sit against your competitors. I then develop alternative identity routes, recommend the strongest one and explain the thinking, so you make the decision with the reasoning in front of you rather than on instinct.

Your chosen route becomes a complete identity of icon, logo, colour palette and typography, supplied as a full file suite, complete with an essentials brand guide.

My Full Identity System, from £3,250, adds to that the practical tools that make an identity usable: stationery templates, social media assets, guidance on the imagery your brand should use, and a working brand guide written for people who aren't designers. That guide is the piece clients tell me makes the difference. Your team can produce or commission on-brand work without ringing me every time.

I spent fifteen years in agencies before running my own studio for the past decade, and a pattern I see a lot is a business that bought a logo when it really needed a system. The logo was fine, but a logo on its own can’t scale without the brand system around it.

Where to start

If you’d like to explore whether your brand is outdated or needs a change, my Brand Audit costs £575 and gives you a straight assessment of where your brand is holding you back, what to fix and in what order. If you then go on to commission a branding project, and there is no obligation, the £575 comes off the price. Get in touch via the contact form.