We have been involved in logo design since late 1980s. All three of us - designers that operate this web site - have strong print industry background. During all those years we must designed thousands of logos. It was always our preferable design task.

In 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 second e-commerce site with modern web 2.0 features. In short, after a couple of weeks of hard work we had all 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/her own logo, but we realized it later. We already built web site template so the logo had to meet certain guidelines (proportions 1:4 and orange-grey color scheme), but 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 use came up with 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 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 hardest to choose it was. Our working efficiency felt down to minimum and we started to apologize to our regular clients for being late, making up various excuses for 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 completely forgotten very first site logo variant, based on very initial idea, and said: Guys, this is actually the perfect logo for our new site!

And it was so true.

…

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

I would usually only open files marked as "final" (which, of course, would be the final versions of logos, web sites, product packages etc) but 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 though) are based on initial ideas
• The more changes a client requests, the logo looks less professional
• The longer 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 portfolio of logos designed without any revisions. And let's charge for logos 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 professional logo design at 1/10 of the regular price, it's that you are getting your logo designed by people that really love what they do. A perfect example of win-win situation for everyone!

Give it a shot, we promise you won't regret it!

Sincerely,
Ivan Cvetkovic,
graphic designer and co-owner of 19dollarlogos.com