19dollarlogos.com - Our Logo Design Philosophy

The three designers that operate this web site have been involved in logo design since the late 1980's and have a strong print industry background. During all those years we have designed thousands of logos. It was always our preferred design task.

In the late summer of 2007 we were about to launch our second vector clipart site vector-clipart.com. Although our flagship clipart site, the famous ClipartLab, was doing great, we couldn't ignore for any longer increasing demand for a second e-commerce site with modern web 2.0 features. In short, after a couple of weeks of hard work, we had all the scripts and materials in place, the e-shop was tested in full, everything was ready for the big launch…only the logo was missing.

It's the hardest thing for a logo designer to design his or her own logo. We had already built the web site template so the logo had to meet certain guidelines (proportions 1:4 and an orange-grey color scheme), however we still thought it would be an easy task. It was three big (in terms of experience and skills) graphics designers against one small logotype. After a couple of minutes one of us came up with an initial idea - standard font, no special signs, no toons and, in order to represent vectors, an arrow instead of "i". Everyone agreed, including the author himself, that it would be too simple a solution for our own logo for our own site...

We must have made 30 different variants in the following days. The more variants we had, the harder it was to choose from. Our working efficiency fell to an all time low and we started to apologize to our regular clients for being late - making up various excuses for the delay. No one could concentrate on any other task, everyone was thinking about the logo that made our lives miserable.

Then, only by chance, someone looked again at the completely forgotten very first site logo variant, based on the very initial idea, and said: "Guys, this is actually the perfect logo for our new site!"

A couple of weeks later, I was putting my backup CDs in order. These are the CD's with source files of past works, Corel and Photoshop brushes and patterns, clip-art, design tutorials and everything else that may be needed at some point in our everyday work. It's a job that would always take me the whole afternoon because I have more than 50 backup CDs and I can't resist looking back at all those previous works of ours. I usually sit down with a coffee cup in my hand, relax and browse directories without thinking much - I just enjoy looking at our previous work.

I would usually only open files marked as "final" (which, of course, would be the final versions of logos, web sites, product packages etc). However, this time I was more interested in working files - sketches, initial ideas, reworks, first logo concepts and such. And it was really interesting what I found out:

• In our portfolio, the majority of the most successful logo designs (from our point of view) are based on the initial ideas.
• The more changes a client requests, the logo looks less professional.
• The longer the design process is, the logo looks less appealing.

And so the idea for this site was born. I said - "Let's go with one-shooters only and see what happens. Let's build a portfolio of logos designed without any revisions. And let's charge next to nothing so unsatisfied customers don't feel too bad!"

So now you know, 19dollarlogos.com is an experimental project. But it's an experiment that you, our dear clients, can only benefit from: it's not just that you are getting a professional logo design at 10% of the regular price, it's also that you are getting your logo designed by people that really love what they do. A perfect example of a win-win situation for everyone!