On many occasions, clients have come to me letting me know their logos were being held "hostage" by a designer.  

Here's how the story goes: 

A relative/friend/stranger created a business logo.  The owner of the company was given a small file so she could use it on her website, which she did.  Then there was a falling out OR the designer just went MIA (not responding to texts, emails, or phone calls). Now what!? A business owner needs to be able to adjust the logo or have large file sizes for printing (a small image will just pixalate if you enlarge it). A business owner may also want to see how the logo looks with different fonts or colors.  Now what?

At this point many business owners may feel trapped but really there are options!

My favorite option is to take back control of your logo! Go to Fiverr and pay someone $5-$10 to recreate your logo.  But you are not going to just ask for them to recreate a bigger file, you are going to ask for things that will protect you in the future.  Here's where you need to do, step by step:

1. Go to Fiverr then GRAPHICS AND DESIGN then LOGO.
2. Find 3-5 designers who have many good, positive reviews.  
3. Send them this message, "Hi - I already have a logo but I want it recreated so I can use it for print and make edits to it in the future.  Please let me know what the cost is for the following:

• Logo must be 300ppi and 14 inches wide (go wider if you plan to ever print giant banners).
• I want to know the names of the fonts you used.
• Send me the file in .png, .gif, .jpg and also send a vector file.

The designers will then let you know what the cost is.  I would expect to pay around $10 for a project like this.  The reason you are messaging 3-5 designers is some will come back with a bid of $25.

If you don't have a program like Photoshop on your computer you will not be able to open the vector file but that is ok.  You'll have the other files that you can use right away. Save the vector file for when you need to make some major changes to the file.

As you probably noticed by now, I am giving away a list of My Favorite Tools.  Well, after nearly a year of having the same list I JUST added a new tool to the document!  The tool is PEEK and really you need to see it in action!

Basically you submit your website and email to Peek.  Peek will then (within a few days) have one of their users do a 5-minute review of your website. The best part is the user is NOT typing up their review.  Instead you can to watch as they interact with your website via screen sharing.  

STEPS (for those who like bullet points):

1. You send Peek your website.
   
2. A user from Peek will click around on your website while recording the screen and their voice.
   
3. Peek will then send you the video so you can see what the user did and said.

The best pro, is that this service is totally free.  The biggest con is that the user is probably not your ideal client so they may not even understand what they are looking at (the entire time they may be trying to understand what a lactation consultant is!).  BUT, and this is a big BUT, you WILL get something out of their review. 

I've used Peek a few times for a few websites and I always learned something.  Once I saw that the user was totally missing a tab of mine because of how I had my menu set up.  This was HUGE and I immediatly went in and updated my website.

So give it a try, it will take second to submit your information to Peek and 5 minutes to watch the video.