New product logo needed for Designbox

Designbox

Designbox is a commercial software add-in product for Microsoft Visual Studio that gives software developers a more productive and fun way to create their applications. It was designed and written by programmers for programmers. And it's currently available from our website at http://www.studioworkssoft.com.

Even though we're happy with the current logo, we know there's a much better one out there. So that's why we're here. And after we're done with the logo, we'll be redesigning our website and starting some banner ads so we're looking for a new image that's going to carry us far into the future.

Our customers are programmers and user interface designers who use Microsoft Visual Studio. They come from a diverse market ranging from programming hobbyists to small and large corporations.

The word "designbox" with a logo or the word "designbox" with some adornments. We're looking for something clean, creative and simple that stands out.

And we want your best work so please start from scratch. There's no need to make anything like our current logo or match our current website. Forget about our existing colors and fonts. Give us your best new design.

About the only thing remaining would be to give you some direction. We prefer that our logo relates to the world in which Designbox lives. Which means something that looks cool, makes sense, and attracts programmers and designers who create user interfaces in Visual Studio. And, for context, the word 'Designbox' relates to the toolbox window within Visual Studio. So please don't limit yourselves to a picture of a design and a picture of a box.

*UPDATE:
We're far enough along in the contest to tell you what seems to appeal to us and what does not work.

WANTS
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- We want a professional, clean looking, simple (but not too simple and boring) logo.

- We'd like the single word "designbox" to play a central role in the logo.

- We'd like the text in either a sans-serif font or an interesting engineering/tech font (but not too crazy on the font)

- We like it when there's a cool image near the text that captures/relates to something in the UI design process or some interesting technical element.

- As an alternative, we also like it when the word "designbox" itself becomes the entire logo by use of a custom font or decorated text. Think twitter, etc. as examples of this kind of approach.

- We like fewer colors rather than more colors.

- CMYK format / vector graphics file - let us know if you can only supply some other format.

DON'T WANTS
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- We don't want the text of "designbox" to be split or broken.

- We don't want the image to be much larger than the text and be the highlight of the logo.

- We don't want any associated images to be just boxes, shaded boxes, or 3d boxes. We are fine without boxes but if there are boxes, we prefer them to be part of something more interesting and clever and not the focal point of the work.

Our Community

Besides on our own website, here are some links to the kinds of companies with which we share customers. All of their logos fit into the same basic theme of what we're looking for. Please don't attempt to copy or incorporate any portions of these existing logos, that would be bad, I only point them out so you have some context of the community in which our logo will exist:

http://www.componentone.com
http://www.devexpress.com
http://www.infragistics.com
http://www.telerik.com
http://www.syncfusion.com

That's about it! We're excited to see what you can do.

Please visit our website to learn more about Designbox:

http://www.studioworkssoft.com

Or the Microsoft website to learn more about Visual Studio:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio