Thought an $80 logo from a guy on Reddit would be a steal...

I was skeptical about paying a proper designer because my first gig was just a dog walking side thing, figured nobody would care about the branding. Found a dude in a freelancer subreddit who said he'd do a logo for $80, so I jumped on it. He sent me this blurry jpeg of a weird clipart paw print that looked like it was from 2003, and when I asked for a vector file he ghosted me. Now I'm out the money and starting from scratch, has anyone else gotten burned like this with cheap design work?

3 comments

3 Comments

fionanguyen20d ago

A blurry jpeg of a clipart paw print, that's genuinely cursed.

lucashenderson20d ago

Does the person who made that even own a pet, or did they just find the clipart in a deep folder on their desktop from 2004? It looks like someone ran a paw print through a photocopier five times, then took a picture of it with a flip phone from inside a moving car. You can't tell if it's supposed to be a cat, a dog, or maybe a raccoon with some kind of disease. The blur adds this weird texture that makes it look like it's trying to crawl out of the image itself. It's the kind of thing you'd find in a haunted thrift store painting, just staring at you from the corner of the room. Honestly, it feels less like a design choice and more like a warning sign.

nancyramirez19d ago

Wait, he actually sent you a blurry JPEG of a clipart paw print? Like, not even a vector file or a proper PNG? That's honestly wild. I mean, I've seen some bad logo scams before, but a blurry JPEG is a new low. It's like he didn't even try to pretend it was his own work, just ran a Google image search and called it a day. I feel like half the battle is just getting a file that's not gonna pixelate when you put it on a business card, you know?