When LogoSnap first launched, it offered Do-It-Yourself (DIY) pre-made logos for a flat fee of $39. Each premade logo was designed to target a particular category, such as architecture, communications, education, construction, healthcare, real estate, sports, and technology. Once a customer chose a design, they could customize their logos with their company name, slogan, fonts, colors, etc, and LogoSnap would send the final image in a variety of formats. Over time the site eventually offered thousands of symbols for customers to choose from and a growing list of logo categories.
By 2010, the site had shifted from charging for logos to offering a DIY logo-builder for free. The company then charged for custom (as opposed to DIY) logos and for print promotional materials, such as brochures, sales sheets, presentation folders, postcards, business cards, and customized letterheads and envelopes.
Like many design companies, once LogoSnap acquired a customer, it tried to expand the number of services that it could offer them. Through affiliated companies, LogoSnap offered a host of promotional services, such as:
Finally, LogoSnap offered limited legal services by partnering with the law firm Allen & Wohrle, LLP. Clients could use this firm to license and trademark their logos and designs.
LogoSnap created its last tweet from its @LogoSnap Twitter account on March 26, 2013. The company didn’t issue any more tweets for nearly 5 years until Oct 17, 2017, when they created a new account, @LogoSnap, and started tweeting again for 8 months.
Up until the end of June 2018, LogoSnap continued to offer free logo design services, although primary space on its website was dedicated to marketing a sister site’s logo design contests.
In 2005, designers on the web development forum SitePoint.com started posting threads asking for help designing logos. The idea was to spark some friendly competition and help businesses in need. The service grew increasingly popular, and some members started offering bounties for the contests. SitePoint’s founder, Mark Harbottle, saw the popularity of the idea and created an infrastructure for hosting the contests. In February of 2008, SitePoint spun this out as a new business, called 99designs.
By April, 99designs reported $1 million a month in revenue, and a new design submitted every 60 seconds. By July 2008, Harbottle stated that traffic had quadrupled from 1.5 million page views in February to 6.2 million in July, with 100 new designers joining every day. Clearly, this idea, which is also called speculative or “spec” design, had hit escape velocity.
Fast-forward to today, and a search for “logo design contest marketplaces” turns up literally hundreds of websites dedicated to crowdsourcing design. The contest approach quite simply ate the market for inexpensive logos.
While LogoSnap wasn’t shut down until late June or early July of 2018, if you examine archives of its pages, it underwent very little change throughout its 14 years in business.
LogoSnap was simply one small arm of a larger organization, called GuruCorp Inc. Over time it went from generating revenue directly to simply funneling traffic to GuruCorp’s other businesses. One reasonable speculation is that if its impact as a traffic source declined enough, LogoSnap may have simply stopped being profitable. Here at Logo we feel that perhaps LogoSnap was just ahead of its time and should have persisted through the changes in the industry. The new AI-powered logo makers have turned the industry on its head with ultra-fast, original logo designs at extremely low prices.
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