CALGARY—Stock imagery company iStockphoto recently posted a notice on its blog announcing plans to add a new lineup of offerings — logos.

“We're excited to announce a whole new product coming to the iStock collection,” said the post by iStockphoto chief operating officer Kelly Thompson. “Clients will soon be able to download a unique logo to brand their business or organization right here at iStock. This is a huge opportunity not just for existing iStock contributors, but for our community of designers as well. If you’re a designer, you've probably created hundreds of different logos over the course of your career and we're offering you an outlet to start selling logos to the world’s largest community of creative buyers. Read all the details and join the discussion here.”

iStock asked for a discussion and that is exactly what it got. With comments ranging from elation to condemnation, there is no shortage of opinion on the announcement. Design Edge talked to iStock’s Kelly Thompson to get the scoop on selling logos.

Design Edge (DE): What is your plan for selling logos on iStock?

Kelly Thompson (KT): I’ll back up a bit…logos are one of the most requested things we get. If you back up even more and think about the market iStock has really managed to create — it’s people that never bought stock photography before but at our prices we’ve got lots of people buying.

You can imagine pretty quickly on the illustration side that people constantly ask us if we can use those images for logos. Of course they can’t. On most royalty free stock it is expressly forbidden and you couldn’t trademark it anyways. So for a long time this has been at the back of our minds. As things have progressed in the markets we thought we were in a place where we felt really comfortable getting the designers and illustrators in our community a lot of money with this initiative. And give something our customers are really looking for.

DE: How much does iStock plan to pay designers for these logos?

KT: There are obviously a lot of discussions around this, one of them being the insane idea that we are selling logos for $5. The idea is that we are giving a bounty to the first 5,000 logos that are uploaded of $5 or $10 if we hit 10,000 uploads. We’re not selling logos for $5. We are actually giving away $50,000 to $100,000 for the logos right off the bat.

The logos are going to be priced from about $100 to $1,000 and designers will be paid 50 per cent of that price. That’s where we think they should be priced; we are still looking into it. We were looking for feedback from the community on what they thought was reasonable. As much as we announced it, we also put out a lot of questions because we have a ways to go on it. We are developing it and we want to develop it with the community. Our first market research said that $100 to $1,000 was the right amount for our type of customer.

Obviously, people who would typically spend $2,000 to $20,000 for a logo aren’t looking for a ‘stock’ type logo. So we’re not going after that market, we don’t think that it’s well served by what we’re doing at all. There are people who are using clip art for logos though. Those are the people who we’re going after. They’re not going to pay $2,000. In the range that we’re looking at we think that there is a sweet spot there.

DE: Why would it be a good idea for a designer to sell their work to this kind of service?

KT: Designers told us right away that not only were they interested in creating logos but that they had logos that they could repurpose for this. Putting them on iStock and perhaps making some money from them is infinitely better than sitting on their hard drives and making no money. Our photographers make a lot of money from iStock but they also make money from people seeing the work that they do on iStock, liking it and asking them to go and do custom shoots. We think this is really going to help the design community that way as well.

DE: What are the legal issues around a program like this?

KT: What we’re saying is that these logos need to be able to be trademarked after their sold. It is up to the customer to take it through that process if they’re interested in getting it trademarked. There are visual searches and things that we are using behind the scenes to make sure that everything is on the up and up but it is the purchasers responsibility to make sure that they can go out and trademark it.

DE: When do you expect the program to be up and running?

KT: We haven’t really given an explicit date. We are looking at doing the ingestion of the logos more than a month from now and start selling them before Christmas.

A lot of the responses have been like the ones we got when we started iStock nine years ago and now you can’t imagine a world without these reasonably priced images. Designers aren’t going anywhere but definitely the marketplace is changing so designers have to get with the times. When you tell a designer that right now we pay out $1.3 million dollars a week to photographers, a light comes on. We are definitely looking at getting a good chunk of that money for designers.

Contact: www.istockphoto.com