Loading…
18
The $40 logo that took 3 months to decode
A buddy of mine runs a small landscaping crew and got a logo from Fiverr for $40. He thought he was saving big, but the file came back as a blurry JPEG with no vector version. I spent a whole evening trying to stretch it for his truck wrap and it fell apart immediately. Said we could redraw it ourselves, but that's another 6 hours of unpaid work. Has anyone else hit the hidden cost of cheap design work?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
joseph_green132mo ago
Last year I got burned the same way on a $35 logo for my welding side gig. The guy sent me a PNG that looked fine on my phone but turned into a pixel mess on any real print. I ended up finding a kid on a local college forum who redrew it in vector format for $60 and he had it done in two days. Now I always ask for the source file and check if it can scale up before I pay. Saved me from having to redo it a third time.
6
the_riley2mo ago
Three different times this year I've watched people get stuck with stuff that looked fine on a screen but fell apart in the real world, like a buddy who ordered a vinyl decal for his truck and the letters were all jagged up close. It's funny how we all assume digital stuff is automatically good enough, but scaling is the one thing nobody thinks to test until it's too late. Your welding logo story is basically the same lesson as my neighbor's wedding invitations, she paid for a fancy PDF and the print shop couldn't even open it right. Once you start asking for the source file and doing that zoom test, you realize half the people selling design work don't even know what vectors are. It's a whole side of the gig economy that's just full of shortcuts, and the buyer always ends up eating the cost twice.
-1