Interactivity is a key to keeping users glued to screens and indeed glued to your brand and business. And a good way of making your brand or business more ‘interactive’ is by animating your logo.
To create an animated logo, you need a top brass logo animator. Logo animators are available everywhere online today, but with that increased availability comes the dilemma of making a selection.
In this guide, I outline everything you need to hire the right logo animator, so you get the best applicable logo animation for your business.
The hiring pitfall
Quick search for ‘logo animation’ on your favorite search engine, and you’re bound to see several online tools for converting traditional logos into animated logos.
Even better (or not), you’ll see other tools for creating an animated logo from scratch. Many of these tools are free, hence their appeal.
Quick tip; except you run a very, very small business and you’re not keen on branding and the customer experience (which begs the question, why do you want an animated logo in the first place), you almost always never want an animated logo from a generic logo generation tool – certainly not the free tools.
The deal with animated logos is that they only look great when they’re made great. Anything less than a great looking animated logo is a poor looking animated logo. That’s compared to traditional logos, which can be great looking, good looking, okayish or downright poor.
Online tools, especially free ones, rarely ever produce great-looking animated logos. For great-looking animated logos, you need a greatly talented logo animator.
What makes a greatly talented logo animator
How do you single out a good logo animator from the literal bunch of freelance logo animators available online today?
1. Awesome portfolio samples
The single most relevant factor that tells a skilled logo animator apart from someone who’s just learning the ropes is the quality of the animated logos they’ve made in the past.
Logo animators usually have portfolios to showcase their work. Ask for a link to their portfolio page, or if you’re hiring on a platform like Fiverr/Upwork, quickly check their main page for related samples.
With every animated logo sample you assess, you’re looking for an animated logo that has;
- Smooth flowing transitions all synchronized and perfectly timed. Something like this.
- Well designed and developed graphical elements. Again, check out the sample I just linked for an idea of what I mean.
- Significant brand correlation. This bit takes a trained eye (or imagination) to perceive, but just the way traditional logos have design elements that reflect on the brand, animated logos should have transitions and sounds that relate to the brand they represent.
Many people and indeed many unskilled animated logo artists imagine animated logos as just adding random animations to a logo design.
What you’ll see is that many, if not most, animated logos are moving designs that never tell a story or provide additional context. Those kinds of logos do little to capture the imagination of customers, consumers or users, so they’re really just a waste of everyone’s time.
2. Their list of past clients
Another way to tell a good freelance logo animator from a bad one (and this time rapidly) is to check out their list of past clients. You’ll find that the crème de la crème of logo animators keep a highly impressive list of top global brands as their clients, unsurprising given their skill.
On the other side of the divide, unskilled logo animators or newbies rarely ever have a list of past clients. Even if they did, it’s usually some obscure brand or business without any significant digital footprint. When scouting for a logo animator, take the time out to assess their clientele list;
- Is any brand or business familiar?
- Is any brand or business notable? And by notable, I mean having a functional and expanding business.
- Are there any brands or businesses with a significant digital footprint on their list?
- How many past clients do they showcase?
Logo animators with well-known multinational brands on their clientele list are sort of hard to find, usually because they’re rarely ‘open-to-everyone’ freelancers.
Logo animators with less well-known but established brands on their client list can be found if you do your due diligence when searching for a freelance logo animator. Ideally, these are the group of logo animators you should target.
Logo animators with unknown brands that are neither established but have stellar portfolios are also good enough.
The guys you want to stay away from are the logo animators with shoddy samples that might look okay at first but fail the brand correlation test; and with no known established brand on their clientele list
NB that established brand in this sense describes brands with a working business, who have an identifiable website and social media handles.
3. Their rates
This might come off as counterintuitive, but the fact is great freelance logo animators charge reasonable rates – not the $5 figures you might see on freelance sites like Fiverr. If you’re paying in the 5$-10 range for a logo animation job, I’ll bet the animator was using the tools I said to avoid earlier on.
Custom animations take time and creativity to develop, and someone who’s good at this will charge good rates for their time. This is generally true for most freelance services (like graphics design) you might purchase.
So what’s the ideal rate to gun for when looking to hire a logo animator:
Not cheap, but not overly expensive either. You can get an excellent animated logo with a $100 – $500 budget if you know where to hire the right logo animators.
But that’s not to totally rule out logo animation services that cost more than that. This logo animator on Fiverr charges a hefty $2000 per animated logo. Pretty steep, no doubt, but the quality of work is impeccable and justifies the price, which is why he has a past clientele list that includes Nike, Red Bull, and Adidas.
Where can you find great freelance animated logo designers
Once you’ve understood what to look out for in the ideal logo animator, the next step would be to find said logo animators.
You can find freelance logo animators by either searching on an agency site or dedicated freelance websites like Upwork and Fiverr.
Which do I recommend?
Well, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and asked which way’s best to hire a freelance logo animator, I’d blurt out Freelance site like Fiverr without skipping a heartbeat. However, it’s important to note that both agency and freelance logo animator sites have peculiarities that make them more fitting to different types of logo animation needs.
To summarize, go with a logo animation agency if:
1. You’re not very sure of what you want in an animated logo.
Reputable logo animation agencies usually have mini branding units that can assess your brand to figure out your ‘stichk.’ Once your brand imagery is all figured out, it’s passed on to the animator for implementation in the logo animation. That’s compared to most logo animators on freelance sites who tackle most jobs on a ‘mercenary’ basis. That is, they work with what they have and rarely dig deep to draw associations or create imagery.
2. You need an entire branding package
So not just animated logos. You want website branding, social media branding and everything else related to distinguishing yourself from the competition. Most agencies with freelance logo animators have entire branding units, so you don’t have to search for and screen several freelancers to get your business branding job done.
Freelance sites like Upwork and Fiverr are good if:
1. You want the best selection of talent
Provided you have time and are ready to search and screen vigorously, you’ll find that freelance sites host a larger and usually more diverse pool of creative talent. This is important if you have special needs; maybe you’re extremely keen on animation style, or you have very particular requirements. Agency sites with freelance logo animators usually retain a limited number of logo animators.
2. You want it cheap
Logo animators on freelance sites are generally cheaper to hire than those you’d find on agency sites.
Freelance sites like Fiverr are where you’d find dirt-cheap logo animators for $5 in the first place. But remember, you’re never going to get any quality work done with a $5 logo animation service.
What you want to do is find the sweet spot between affordable and excellent quality. Luckily there are hundreds of skilled logo animators on freelance sites offering fairly priced logo animation services that deliver excellent animated logos at a pocket-friendly price point.
Does the quality of animated logo differ between agencies and freelance sites like Fiverr?
Not exactly, since both places usually staff skilled animators. With freelance sites, however, you must be careful with how you screen and select potential hires, as that has a bearing on the quality of the animated logo you’ll receive. Use the points are outlined above as the first pass for screening; I’ll talk briefly about using reviews to make a final decision.
Using reviews to screen potential logo animators
Freelance sites like Upwork and Fiverr allow past clients to review the service they got from logo animators on the platform. You can use these reviews to assess a freelance logo animator before taking a plunge. Here’s the catch, though, reviews can be faked, both on Fiverr and Upwork.
Follow these steps, so you don’t fall to the gimmicks of fake reviews when hiring a logo animator;
1. Don’t pay too much attention to the positive reviews
A bit counterintuitive, but most positive reviews will just about say the same thing. Plus, fake reviews are mostly positive reviews. So long a freelance logo animator has a significant number of positive reviews (anything in the 10 – 1000 range), that’s that for positive reviews.
2. What do the negative reviews say?
Negative reviews are a more objective way to assess freelance animators on these platforms. What do the negative reviews say? Is there a common theme among the negative reviews? How many are they, and how did the logo animator respond? A theme with the negative reviews shows that this is not just a one-time thing; if there are lots of negative reviews, whatever the theme or complaint, then I’d be wary of working with the animator in question.
How much will it cost to animate a logo?
For a ballpark figure, a budget between $100 – $500 should get you a pretty solid animated logo. Now, of course, you can get an animated logo for less than $100 (especially if you’re dealing with logo animators on sites like Fiverr). Unfortunately, the quality usually doesn’t measure up to what you’d get from skilled professional animators who price their services accordingly.
The actual cost you’ll pay ultimately boils down to your needs and how complex an animated logo you plan to get. Simple animated logos obviously cost less, but if you want something as intricate as what you’d get from this freelance logo animator on Fiverr, then the bill shoots up.
Why is it so expensive to hire a skilled logo animator?
As I said earlier, there are two ways to create an animated logo;
- Using automated logo animation tools like Canva.
- Animating a logo from scratch using professional animation software like Adobe After Effects
With the first option, the animation produced is usually granular and without the intricate details that make for a captivating animated logo. Most services that do this require no learning, so you’re better off animating your logo yourself and saving that ‘cheap’ $20 you’ll otherwise pay.
Making an animated logo with custom effects and fluid, also custom transitions on pro software like Adobe After Effects requires skill and expertise. There’s a steep learning curve, plus a good animator will probably put in hours to conceptualize design and rig the animations for an animated logo. That’s compared to the first option, where you basically use animation templates.
For their time, skill and effort, experienced logo animators will charge a pretty sum. But given the quality of the animation produced, I’d say it’s a well worthy investment if you’re serious about making your brand stand out.
To conclude
Hiring an animator is easy as pie if you know what to look for and where to look. Importantly, don’t fall for the gimmick of self-made animation services, except, of course, you just need a placeholder animated logo, not something that sets you apart from the competition.
If you want the real deal, the kind of animated logo that’ll get people talking and interested in your brand, you need a custom animated logo made by a professional freelance logo animator.
