Designing A New Club Logo:

[MrMessy]

I am a committee member of the North Yorkshire Road Racing Supporters Club (NYRRSC) and we are having a new website built. It as been suggested that we need to update our logo and need a graphic designer to do this. Is this correct? Is there any readily available software that we can use to do a design ourselves? www.nyrrsc.net

The logo is ok to me - I've seen a lot worse but it's also not really saying anything about yourselves so I could see why someone might want to upgrade it.

You can use anything to design a logo - pen and paper, wood and woad but really you need to get it into a digital format somehow and that normally involves photoshop / illustrator / even inDesign as the pro tools. There's also some good free imagery programs eg the Gimp (seriously!).

Things to bear in mind is that you want a logo that works well across a variety of mediums - from a massive billboard poster to a business card. You'll also want to ensure it that the final format is usable for these mediums - vector graphics normally cover this as you can scale / shrinkl them with no quality loss.

A good designer will be able to do all this for you but it is doable yourselves. Time and Effort vs Get what you pay for.

[Paul the 6th]

when I've been given a brief, I usually have a little brain storm session and come up with 3-5 different design ideas based around the key bits of the brief. Send these back to the client to make sure I'm going in the right direction. Then when they email back saying 'yep I like that bit of number 2 and most of number 5' I'll then combine said bits to make one logo, and then develop that logo idea further with 4 slightly different versions...

Don't be afraid to use google images to search for things like 'road racing' or 'racing logo' to see what other people have done and also to find yourself some inspiration. When you see a logo you like, take some time to work out why you reacted in a positive way to the logo, and if you wanted to create your own logo in that style, how would you make yours better?

Have a think about what 'road racing' encapsulates for you and your club members.. things like speed, engineering, teamwork, competition etc... can all be worked into the logo (design elements to suggest this stuff could include: clocks/timing numbers/abstract swoosh marks to suggest speed/silouettes of people working together/traffic cones/flags/bikes etc)

Tbh, the current logo looks very clean, concise and official. Is this the format of the club or is it more socially/commercially orientated?

Also as McK said, it's worth considering where your logo is going to be used. If it's just on websites & print then you can go nuts with a very intricate design and lots of colours or even graduated colours. If the logo is regularly stuck to bikes & cars in the form of adhesive vinyl then you might want to reconsider using so many colours or simplify the design slightly to reduce cutting costs @ the sign writers.

As for design software, I could only recommend the stuff I use (industry standard stuff) like CorelDraw x5, Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, since I don't use anything else.

If you're struggling to come up with design ideas on your own, why not ask some of the committee to submit a selection of designs - this could save alot of 'paid' design time in a studio if you're all already agreed on the design and just want someone to create the digital version for you

[punyXpress]

Spit it out to the membership asking for ideas by Christmas.
The previous government spent £millions ( of our money ) so try to do it on the cheap. There should be loads of graphic designers with time on their hands.

dont forget a new motto
i was thinking
wishing we were born in ulster since nov 85

For what its worth I like the logo you have at present. It looks professional, fits in with your website and is the kind of logo that can be used on all sorts of things such as stationary etc.

[Binky]

Originally Posted by MrMessy

I am a committee member of the North Yorkshire Road Racing Supporters Club (NYRRSC) and we are having a new website built. It as been suggested that we need to update our logo and need a graphic designer to do this. Is this correct? Is there any readily available software that we can use to do a design ourselves? www.nyrrsc.net

Unless someone in the committee is competent at using Illustrator or Photoshop then you may struggle to get a logo of a decent standard that you can use.

Even if you have some really good drawn sketches etc...

Get a designer i say.

[MrMessy]

Thanks everyone for the input. Has been very usefull.