Sure there are lots of design companies in a whole range of prices, but be careful what you are a getting. I recently had the opportunity to work with a not so local gym, based in Pacific Beach California. They were opening up a Crossfit gym and had an expensive lease and made a large initial investment. They decided to skip on eSea Media on the web design and print design and go cheap. They outsourced the web design to India and gave the print work to local “design company” in San Diego.

The design company had business cards an office and even a few employees. But, what they soon found out is what they saved in money cost them time, stress and eventually more money. We like to provide our customers with choices so that we can make revisions don’t get me wrong, but this company gave them 12 mock ups everyday and was pretty much asking them to tell them what to design. They were getting stressed out. They weren’t designers that is why they hired someone else to do it and they were about to open up a gym in a few weeks and they had no business cards or fliers because it had taken over two weeks and many revisions to complete them.

Here is the San Diego based Design Firms final logo and design after two weeks of work:

Now without being a design critic I am sure that most of you would agree this is not the kind of quality you would expect when paying someone for design. After wasting a few weeks of time and hundreds of dollars they called us back and decided to give us a shot. Not only did we complete the job but we turned it around in a matter of hours. Just remember, you might pay someone a cheap hourly rate but it could take them forever or you could pay a true professional more hourly and it only takes a short amount of time.

Here is our design, which only took a few hours with no revisions:

We created a new usable logo and postcard. The customer was more than please, they got exactly what they asked for and paid the same as they did the “cheaper” San Diego firm. Next they had us look at their website which was a wreck. The same principal applied, they outsourced hourly work to India, in which they charged them for many hours and merely put some info into a basic template. The English was misspelled, the backend was difficult to use and the design did not captivate the culture of the gym. If you do not know about crossfit, it is a hardcore workout that Marines use to train. Yet they had pictures of people doing yoga and the elderly at doctors offices, which had nothing to do with their company, their message or their culture. When they tried to contact “Roger” they got no response. It just goes to show that when it comes to design make sure you are choosing the right company for the right reason and not running after a price tag. It could end up costing you more in the long run. As for Crossfit PB, they have enlisted eSea Media as their permanent design guys, we are currently designing a line of t-shirts for their gym and will be working to fix their website in the future.