freelance - Advice when hiring a freelancer for creating a company logo

I'm about to hire a freelancer to create a logo for my IT consulting company. My personal thoughts:

• The logo will be vector based as I might need to use it at different sizes.



• It should look good in color as well as in black and white.


• I'll give the artist as much freedom as possible, as I think the result will improve.


• Antialiasing should be done using different levels of transparancy. So that I may use my logo on different colored backgrounds.

Some questions:

1. Which vector based file format should I choose? I work exclusively in GNU/Linux and use free software.


2. Should I ask for a color and a black and white version? The alternative is just to ask for a color version and just turn it into black and white myself, or let the printer driver take care of it.


3. How would you recommend I structure the project until delivery. I don't want to be unreasonable and I want the artist to have as much freedom as possible. Still it would be nice to get a few rough choices (maybe done using stencil or another quick way) fairly early in the project.


4. Should I provide 2-3 backgrounds which the logo should look good against? Or maybe just say that it should look against white and black backgrounds.



5. Anything else I should think of?