I’ve been working from home for three years. I started in 2005, when I left a cube-farm commuter job and joined a small company based about an hour’s drive from my house. The plan was to commute in as needed, perhaps once a week, but work from home most of the time.

I had no idea, absolutely no friggin’ clue, how much it was gonna suck. My typical day went like this:

* get up
* check company IRC, say good morning, make sure nothing’s on fire yet
* lunch, maybe some scrabble or a TV show
* meeting about something. with phone muted, can watch youtube videos
* work some more, but with more interruptions
* dinner, hopefully in proximity to another human
* hack on the side project du jour
* go to sleep

This post is half of a pair of posts on working from home. I’m giving you the bad news first. Here’s the most important thing you should know:

It’s not just a matter of feeling lonely: all kinds of emotions depend on regular, face-to-face human interaction, and you run a serious risk of becoming unproductive, uninspired, and even depressed without it.

Let me reiterate: feeling lonely at work isn’t the only–or even the primary–way that working from home screws you. Well before your soul starts to scream with loneliness — which might never happen if you have family or friends you see regularly — you will suffer from being alone.

The first thing to go is probably motivation. For this you can blame a massive cut in feedback. In an office you get feedback constantly. At the coffee pot in the morning, eye contact shows interest in your latest tasks, or nods express sympathy about difficult colleagues and bosses. When you have a question about something, your coworker’s eyes and facial expressions will tell you, consciously or subconsciously, if you’re sounding smart or stupid. Chances are, you depend on this feedback more than you realize. You need it both for work-specific communication, which is easy to see, and for maintaining your self-image, esteem, and motivation–which is harder to see because the mechanisms are subconscious.

You don’t get rich feedback when communicating over a phone, email, or text chat. No facial expressions; no idea whether a persons eyes are wandering or locked on; maybe some hint of tone of voice. All this feedback is distilled and distilled away when you’re not there to pick it up in person, and this will affect you quickly and constantly if you work remotely.

You might say, ah, the hell with it, I’ll learn to live without that feedback. After all, doesn’t Paul Graham say that people with “unlimited self-generated morale” are almost guaranteed to succeed? Don’t you want to be like that?

Chances are, you could be more determined. But there are very few people — perhaps mostly sociopaths and the autistic — who can pursue a goal indefinitely without feedback. Be aware of the feedback you need, and work on making it possible. And remember that when you’re considering working from home, you’re going to tear away a lot of that feedback.

Logo design in today’s world is totally under rated.

People do not understand how important a good logo is and how valuable it is to their business.

In this article I am going to outline the ways in which you should NOT go about getting your logo designed… that is, if you are truly serious about business.

What is A Logo?

To understand what a logo is meant to do, we first must know what a logo is. A logo’s design is for immediate recognition, inspiring trust, admiration, loyalty and an implied superiority. The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic entity, and its shapes, colours, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.

It makes me wonder why people have no logo or why they would even bother with a cheap logo design if a logo is meant to do all of these things?

Logo Design Contests

The worst deal you could probably go for is a logo design contest. Logo design contests are where you give a brief and then you have multiple designers come back to you with their designs. Although this sounds like a mighty good deal, the quality is usually far from anything you would want to represent your business.

You will be wasting your money and in the long term, in terms of damage done to your business, that amount could be quite considerable.

On another note, design contests & designers who design on a speculative basis are damaging the design industry as designers should not have to invest time and resources with no guarantee of payment.

If you want further proof, read these articles: Logo Design Contests Are Bad For Business or The Reality of Logo Design Contests.

Too Good To Be True Deals

If you do a search on ‘logo design’ on google you will find many businesses offering logo designs for very cheap and unbelievable prices. Such deals as “5 design concepts from 5 designers!” or “6 logos from 5 designers only $200″ – Stay away!

These deals are extremely deceiving and the quality is far from satisfactory. Have you ever wondered how much thought they actually put into your logo design? Professional logo designers have a strict logo design process that can take weeks or in some cases months to complete a logo. They may offer you a result within 24 hours or maybe even less meaning literally no thought was put into your logo design.

Stock Imagery

Some so called “designers” (usually the same people who enter design contests) steal images from stock sites to design your logo… or in some cases business owners download and use the stock images themselves. This is a huge no-no. Did you know that stock imagery gets downloaded by thousands of people? This should be reason enough not to use stock imagery as your logo.

If you do this, other people will have access to your logo design and can and will use it in places that will potentially devalue your business. Ensure your logo design is original.

Do It Yourself Logo Design

Closely linked to the stock imagery scenario above, business owners or those wanting a logo will try to do it themselves. I highly recommend against this and suggest you leave the design to a professional, much as you would leave your dental work to a dentist.

Free Logo Makers

You will find many free online logo makers on the web. Not only do these logos look unprofessional, hundreds of other people could have the same logo as you and what is the point of that? These logos have no thought, concept or memorability about them, they are merely symbols.

They say nothing about your business and do nothing that a logo is supposed to do… I repeat, stay away from free logo makers.

Getting A Design Without Feedback

Before approving and implementing a design, ensure you get feedback from your clients, peers, and stakeholders. Getting feedback on a design is a crucial part of the logo design process as it ensures that your logo is going to be successful.

Take these poor phallic logo designs above. I wonder if they realized their logos had such hidden meaning? Ensure you don’t turn out like this by getting a professionally designed logo.

What is the cost of a professional logo design?

The cost of a professional logo design is a question that cannot be easily answered as every company has different needs, however, the best way to approach this problem is to draw up a customized quote for each individual.

A number of factors have to be taken into consideration when designing a logo, such as how many logo concepts need to be presented, how many revisions are required, how much research is needed, the size of the business and so on.

To wrap up, I’d like to quote a comparison by David Airey: Comparing the design industry to any other is by no means exact, but the, “How much for a logo?” question is kind of like asking an estate agent, “How much for a house?”.