A $150 mistake on a badge design I thought I could DIY

A few months back I needed a simple logo badge for a local ABQ landscaping crew I was freelancing for. I thought I could save them money and do it myself in Canva, instead of hiring a proper graphic designer. I spent about 6 hours messing with fonts and colors, and the final result looked like something a kid made. The client was polite but asked for a redesign, and I ended up losing $150 of my own time that I could have spent on actual pressure washing gigs. I finally paid a designer from this group $75 and got a clean badge in two hours. Has anyone else tried to skip hiring a specialist and regretted it?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby_bell471d ago

Oh man I've been there too! That feeling of staring at something you spent hours on and knowing deep down it just looks wrong is the worst. What really helped me was learning that good design is mostly about making tiny adjustments that seem stupid until you see the difference. Like I used to think white space was wasted space until someone showed me how moving text away from the edges makes everything look ten times more professional. Also free font sites are a trap they have tons of fonts that look okay on their own but clash horribly when you put them together. Learning about font pairing saved me from a lot of future headaches honestly.

webb.hannah3d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, that hurts to read! I tried making my own logo for a side hustle once too and it was such a disaster. Ended up with weird spacing and bad color combos that just screamed "amateur." Sometimes you really do get what you pay for especially with design work.

brooke_murray3d ago

@webb.hannah you're so right about the color combos though. That's the part that always trips me up too, thinking I can just eyeball it and it'll look fine. Actually, spacing is the real killer too, nothing screams "home made" like letters that are all smooshed together or floating apart.