Creativity Wanted! Design new logo for scholarship resource site

Scholarship Junkies

Scholarship Junkies is a scholarship resource website and network created by college students in Seattle seeking to help prospective scholarship applicants compile competitive applications for college funding. Based on our personal successes at applying for scholarships (for college, graduate school, etc.), we want to partner with any students who are seeking funding to further their education as well. Through one-on-one mentorship using a diverse range of communication methods (email, Facebook, Skype, phone calls, etc.), "Scholarship Junkies" partner with prospective scholarship applicants from all walks of life to do achieve our central goal—turning our passions and experiences into opportunities for success through further education. We believe that every student has the right to pursue higher education and to do it without sacrificing everything they have or taking on a ridiculous amount of student debt. Our company's culture is one of service—we will do whatever it takes to help our students find, choose, and apply competitively for as many scholarships as possible. We want to emphasize our personal experiences and ability to connect with all students because of our age and diverse backgrounds. As we tell every student, "never underestimate your story or your ability to impact others."

Mostly, we target high school students searching for scholarships for college; however, we serve anyone who seeks our help and advice. That means, we also work with college students, graduate students, or people looking to simply pursue education and need some money for it. The market for our work exists already and, in fact, has even greater needs than what we alone can provide. Our goal is not to compete with other scholarship resource websites that already exist, but rather to serve as an important complement to the scholarship search engines and resource pages that are doing a great job already. Where we are unique is the fact that we fill a very specific gap in this whole process—that is, the gap between finding a scholarship and actually succeeding in applying for it. We fill this gap by providing one-on-one mentorship and guidance through the entire process of making a scholarship applicant as competitive as possible. Our closeness in age to our students makes our work all the more effective, and we create a cycle of "giving back" when many of our students who have scholarship success, in turn, encourage other students to apply for scholarships as well. A supportive community is important to us—we want our website visitors to feel like this is their network and community too.

Because we have no logo at the moment, we are seeking creative designs for our revamped website that will be launching shortly. Aside from making a logo that is not too cluttered or busy, the only requirements (as of now) are:

• Include the name "Scholarship Junkies"
• Include our preferred color—a shade of light blue (sorry, don't have a specific name, but can provide feedback to help steer toward the hue we have in mind), but doesn't have to be the ONLY color
• Not too cartoony/childish; we want to convey a professionalism that is clean, crisp, and modern, yet not too corporate or fancy so that we lose our high school age students
• Please do not use real photos, stock photos, or clip art; we would like the logo to either be a creative spin of our brand name or include smooth cartoon-type drawings
• Suggested: maybe include some form of dollar signs (i.e. a dollar sign, a bag of money, etc.) or maybe include symbols of graduation/diplomas

Example of a design we like:

http://99designs.com/logo-design/co…entries/28

We would like the files to be in the following formats:
Print file format - .ai (CMYK)
Web file format - .jpg and layered .psd (RGB)

You can find out more about us at our current (desperately in need of a makeover) website: http://www.scholarshipjunkies.com.