Curtis Tucker } Cartoon Logo Designer

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Curtis D. Tucker
Professional Funny Logo Designer for Hire

Welcome to my cartooning website! Many of you have come looking to hire a specialized cartoonist to create your unique cartoon logo, character or illustration. Others have come searching for cartoon information and career tips, while others have come to snag a cartoon picture or two.

Well, I mean to provide all of that and more. My website is full of creative cartoon logo samples, cartooning advice and all around cartoon stuff. I am a cartoon logo designer and cartoon entrepreneur. I create cartoon content which includes clip art, royalty free characters, greeting cards and articles.

My story begins way back in junior high, in Enid, Oklahoma, when I used to read MAD Magazine. My favorite sections were the Don Martin cartoons. I also loved reading Peanuts and any comic book I could get my hands on. My mom was an artist and I think because of that I began doodling my own versions of the cartoons I saw. I definitely was not a prodigy, as a matter of fact my first cartoons are down right embarrassing.

I’m your logo design dude!

It was in high school that I began developing my line of characters. I called them Big Nose characters because they all started with a big circle as the nose. There was Joe Vacation, Real Neil, The Beav and a large supporting cast. Joe Vacation was the first cartoon I filed a copyright on while still in high school.

I didn’t do much cartooning through the college years, although I would pick up a t-shirt design or a logo for small company from time to time. I did even manage to take one cartooning class before I graduated. I really had no idea how to make money with cartooning so I pursued a graphic design degree. There was a point where I started my own very, tiny greeting card company using my Big Nose characters. I had traded some printing time for doing some graphic work. I actually sold these cards to friends and family.

In 1986 I graduated college with a Bachelors in Graphic Advertising Design. I left school with no idea of what I wanted to do and with zero knowledge of how to even turn on a computer. I wasn’t doing any commercial cartooning but had decided I might try my hand at sending gag cartoons through the mail to magazines. I built up a large collection of gag cartoons during this time and a very nice pile of rejection letters. Looking back at those cartoons I can see why they were never used.

I jumped from job to job including silk screen printer, sign maker and layout artist. I also began entering some cartoon design contests just for the fun of it. After only my second try I won a statewide calendar contest for the largest radio station in OKC called the KATT. The KATT calendar was a hit and gave me some pretty good confidence. I won a few more contests including a third place in the KATT calendar contest and another first place the following years. I may have been their only two time winner.

I finally landed a Director of Advertising position where I learned how to turn on a computer and plug a few numbers into some software called DOS. So at the age of 27 I knew almost nothing about computers.

From there I toyed with some new programs including Windows, Pagemaker and Corel Draw. All the while I began to do logo design on the side using this new found software.

After many years of learning things I missed out on in college I jumped from PC to Mac and quickly learned Photoshop and Illustrator. I also heard about this thing AOL was touting called the Internet. I must have received 200 AOL CD’s in the mail giving me 100 free hours of Internet. I did finally break down and join AOL. I think I was a member for 3 months and mainly used the chat rooms. I don’t think I ever left the AOL pages because I had no idea where to go from there. There was no Google and hardly anyone had a website.

Around the late 90’s I began to doodle with cartoons, greeting cards and the Internet again. During my surfing I was running into more and more guys uploading their cartoons onto the Internet and many were making money through banner ads. In 1998 I awoke and declared to my wife that I wanted to change careers to cartooning. I immediately began drawing gag cartoons and started mailing them to magazines again. I continued to get those fun little rejection letters but started making it to the editorial round of some big magazines. I also sold a few cartoons to a nationally syndicated strip called New Breed that featured up and coming cartoonists.

I was beginning to accumulate stacks and stacks of cartoons that were not being used anywhere. One day I decided to trade a cartoon logo with a friend for his promise to build me a website that I would be able to upload my cartoons to. I believed I could post my cartoons online and editors would gladly hop on and buy them from me. LOL!

Of course the sales never happened but I did learn that there were other cartoonists making big money online from the traffic they garnered by drawing daily cartoons. Banner ads were all the rage and everyone was making a killing. I knew instantly that that was my calling!

My buddy was so swamped with other websites that he handed me a very clunky program and told me to build a site on my own. I accepted the challenge and after buying Curtoons.com in 1999 I built my first website. It was a mess but I had cartoons online! I quickly upgraded my software to FrontPage and eventually learned Dreamweaver. The cartooning community was perfect for link trading and chatting so I ended up with tons of links to my site.

Traffic from search engines like AltaVista, HotBot, ODP, Lycos and Yahoo! kept the visitors coming to my site. I never made money with my cartoons or banner ads but because I created a portfolio page full of my cartoon designs I started getting interest in my logo designs, especially the cartoon logos.

I soon optimized my website for cartoon logos and character design and the rest is history. It was about that time that a startup search engine called Google came along. From its beginning I was ranked #1 for cartoon logos and have been in that spot for well over 10 years now!

My cartoon logo designing career went into full swing and after cutting back hours at my advertising job I eventually quit and began working full time from home for clients all over the world. I also began building a few more websites and learned a bit about SEO to get more traffic. I was trying out affiliate marketing and a few other money making systems when Google AdSense came along. I had a few Google ads on my sites and was making pennies a day.

When I started making a whopping $2-$3 a day I was so excited because I had finally found a way to at least cover my domain name and hosting costs. While reading Fortune magazine on the treadmill one day I read about two guys making $5000 a month with AdSense on their sites. That’s when the light bulb went off.

I hurried home, added AdSense code to every page of every site I had at the time and waited with my fingers crossed. Overnight I was making $15-$20 a day and it quickly started to increase every day. That led to an increase in my website creation which led to more income. All of this has led to a successful AdSense business that I created with free information on the Internet, not buying one marketing guru book ever.

Today, I split my time between creating cartoon designs for clients and adding new content to my 100 websites, blogs and directories. I currently have moderately successful websites filled with cartoon clip art, royalty free characters, greeting cards and other useful information. I am mastering WordPress and hope to increase my design speed and design quality.

I still work from my home studio while helping cart around two beautiful daughters. My wife and I have a great life and I love helping clients create the coolest looking cartoon designs. Please let me know if I can help. I answer my own phone and 98% of the time do every aspect of each project. I look forward to hearing from you!

My gallery of cool cartoon characters is located at Life’sACharacter.com. These are royalty free cartoons that can be used for a reasonable price. I retain the copyright and resell the images to others but you are free to use them for multiple purposes for one low fee. Check them out.

And don’t forget my collection of low and high resolution clip art at FreeClipArtPics.com. Be sure and stop by to see if I have the perfect cartoon picture you are searching for.

Learn everything there is to know about me at CurtisTucker.com.