Logos from gmo

[gmo]

So here I am having gone from sheepishly claiming I would likely never post any logos, to submitting a couple, to boldly creating a thread for my work. Guess it goes to show never say never. Logo-making may not be a continuing interest of mine, but I am enjoying it now and decided to put this together.

If one wanted to be so generous as to say I have a style, here is how I would clumsily describe it. I do not mind going with the square shape and making something that would not necessarily be a "real" logo. I would not mind if I made such a thing, but that is not necessarily an aim. I always start with the 150x150 box and go from there. I like color and a lot of it. As some other people tend to prefer, I typically like at least attempting to have the team name and nickname in the logo and large enough to be readable even when in the game the figures are smaller than 150x150. My designs are generally rather simple, in part because I like that sort of style, in part because I think that lends itself to logos looking better in the game, and in large part because my tools and especially skills are not that great.

I have graduated from MS Paint to MS Picture It! Photo, and I think I am better than I was when I first started trying to make logos for myself. But my software is still somewhat limited, and I do not consider myself a very good artist. I want to do this because it is something I enjoy doing and maybe there will be a few others out there who will like and even consider using the things I liked enough to post. It has been nice seeing the amount of support received by my entries in the logo contest so far.

This thread will serve as an organization of anything I may post, so it might be easier if anyone wants to find something or maybe try to get something tweaked or slightly changed. Below is a list of my postings.

[gmo]

Logo list with links

Indianapolis Rounders
Santiago Salsa
Camaguey Vaqueros
Oriente Azucareros
Ottawa Otters
New York Vipers
New York Vipers
Jacksonville Commodores
Los Angeles Dragons
Wisconsin Trappers
Fort Worth Buckaroos
Seattle Orcas
Portland Seals
San Francisco Circuits
Los Angeles Stars
Miami Suns
Miami Suns
Orlando Gators
Orlando Gators
Charlotte Cherokees

[gmo]

Indianapolis Rounders - logo contest

Here are my various ideas. Versions in bmp format are included in a zip file in the following post after the description. The bmp versions are included because the jpg files suffer from some information loss due to compression.

[gmo]

Indianapolis Rounders continued...

An oval with a diamond super-imposed on it was taken immediately as the basis. Very simple to make - an important key - and hopefully capturing possibilities of the nickname. The idea of showing a baseball in the diamond came quickly, though it took a while of plenty of trial and error to get the end result. The oval in the center is ideal for wrapping the text on the oval side and flattening it on the other. I picked the font I used with all caps, serifs, and a block-y nature fairly quickly, but played around with other possibilities along the way. The simple wings were added late in the process as I was looking for something to add on the middle outside to the words and oval/diamond. I considered stars within the track, but soon picked out the wings because of the link with the various logos of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Indianapolis 500 races.

I decided to go with a red & white color scheme because for some reason I thought at some point there was a "Redbirds" team in Indianapolis. Wrong! But those colors do match up with the Indiana University Hoosiers, and Hoosiers is a nickname that Indianapolis teams have used. I stuck with the red & white (not learning the Redbirds assumption was incorrect until after finishing) after also trying an alternative blue & yellow scheme. These colors were taken from the Indiana state flag. I thought those colors looked pretty good but not as good as the red & white.

Not much to say about the letter versions. I went with a less blocky and more script-like font and offset the letters trying to get away from the idea of "IR" as "injured reserve." If taken separately I think I prefer the blue & yellow of the letter versions because I feel it gives a better sense of layering as in the other the white letters on the white ball are somewhat unsatisfactory. The wings are absent because I added those to the other versions late in the process, and when I tested them they just did not look that good. It seemed to clutter up the image.

[Maximus]

GMO those logo rock man. Great job.

[gmo]

Ottawa Otters - logo contest

Here are my various ideas. Versions in bmp format are included in a zip file in the following post after the description. The bmp versions are included because the jpg files suffer from some information loss due to compression.

[gmo]

Ottawa Otters continued...

I knew I would not be making an otter myself, though I did poke around looking for an otter to incorporate. I found one possible otter graphic but relatively quickly decided to just forget about the animal. Looking for ideas I found the new Ottawa city flag and the new Ottawa city wordmark. The blue/green/white offered a very nice color scheme. Plus the streamers around and composing the "O" caught my eye.

With the dominance of "O" here, going with a round logo seemed pretty obvious. That allows for "Ottawa" and "Otters" to go in a torus (the doughnut shape). Originally I wanted to make the top and bottom halves different colors - one the blue and one the green. I started with blue on the bottom (like water?) and green on the top (like land?), but when I began adding white things to the white center, they were not showing up well. So I made the whole torus one color and used the other color for the interior.

The streamers from the Ottawa city logos seemed something good to trail from a baseball as though in flight. I ended up stylizing the 3 streaks from those logos rather than trying to recreate them, but I think some resemblance is retained, and I feel at least some spirit is. I had wanted to add a maple leaf in some way, perhaps filling the interior with a baseball atop it or maybe on top of a baseball that itself filled the interior. But I decided to separate the two, and a home plate seemed like a good place to add the maple leaf in the now colored interior, conveying an idea of Canada as home. Having the ball streaking over the plate and leaf just came together rather than choosing a larger version of one or the other.

It took some time to settle on a satisfactory font, but I decided not to go with something like in the city wordmark and instead to go with simple all-caps with a good deal of spacing between the letters. The diamonds on either side of the torus were a late addition to just add a bit more spice.

The alternative colors are simply a reversal of the blue and green. I like both versions, but since the white font shows up somewhat better on the darker background I selected the blue torus and green interior.

For the simple letter design rather than something circular I choose an ellipsoid "O" to maintain the idea it was indeed an "O" and not just something round. I decided to keep only the streaking ball to maintain from the original logo, though I played around with also and instead the maple leaf and plate. I prefer the blue "O" and green background since that matches with the contest-entered logo.

[gmo]

Jacksonville Commodores - logo contest

Here are my various ideas. Versions in bmp format are included in a zip file in the following post after the description. The bmp versions are included because the jpg files suffer from some information loss due to compression.

[gmo]

Jacksonville Commodores continued...

I had a C64 way back in the day... I really like some of the Vanderbilt Commodores logo I have seen, like this and this from LogoServer. So I had to find something different to go with. Off I went hunting for a graphic idea. After a bit I came across a wooden steering wheel (is there a non-landlubber term for it I don't know?) that seemed like a good launching point. So I set out making such a wheel for myself with whatever shapes seemed good. The handles are actually from exclamation marks.

After getting the basic wheel laid out I went on to deciding on colors. Once again I tried the city flag route. Cannot say I am a big fan of the Jacksonville city flag, but it feature a sort of orange and gold that could be taken as team colors. Maybe not very pretty, but a different scheme from one I have used so far. The horse-riding Andrew Jackson on the flag might have been an ideal graphic if Jackson had been in the navy. But there is no way I could have done anything like that, so all the better that he was not. Turned out that the orange fit the wheel quite nicely giving it a wood look and feel. But the gold did not look that good as the background nor in the words I had decided could wrap around the wheel. So I decided to add another color for the background. I started with a sky blue that was not very pleasing, but after a couple of steps of darkening more toward a water blue it seemed quite nice.

The font for those massive words took a long time to settle on. The one I picked was so because the "J" and "C" have very similar shapes. On the side I had been playing around with an anchor I pieced together after realizing (as others obviously did) that a good anchor could look like a "JC" or vice versa. The anchor I made does not evoke the image of those letters too well, but I still added it also because it adds just a bit more decoration. The baseball had been in the center of the wheel (because it fit there), and I maintained it after adding the anchor.

The set of simple letter designs illustrate how I played around with that. The one with the wheel is simply almost the same as the submitted logo but without the anchor. The other two are based around the anchor and trying to align that with the "JC". One has the same font as the submitted logo, and the other has a different font trying to make the letters themselves a little more hidden by the anchor shape.

[gmo]

Originally Posted by Maximus

GMO those logo rock man. Great job.

Thanks. I've learned I can do this a little bit but that when it comes to graphics for almost anything there will be somebody in the community who likes it. We have some brilliant artists here, but I don't think it hurts having as many artists period as we can. Plus, I'm just having fun with it.

[Eugene Church]

gmo, those are works of art.

Your logos are as good as they get and could go up against the best designers.

They are well designed...and have great colors and fonts...well thought out, too.

I would be proud to have you do any logos I request.

They really are great...and they really show up well in the game...something I like in a logo.

Please post any of your future logo designs. I enjoy viewing them very much.

[gmo]

Fort Worth Buckaroos - logo contest

Here are my various ideas. Versions in bmp format are included in a zip file in the following post after the description. The bmp versions are included because the jpg files suffer from some information loss due to compression.

[gmo]

Fort Worth Buckaroos continued...

This was a tough one. I knew I would not be able to make a cowboy and/or bucking horse or bull as many others were able to do quite well. I floundered for a while trying to think of something but finally started getting somewhere at least tangential to the ideas of the city skyline and a cowboy hat.

The skyline idea itself did not pan out at all, but it got me to what I ended up trying to mimic - the facade of the stock exchange at the stockyards. The cowboy hat I had decided I could put on top of the skyline (or building). It took many failed attempts at trying something fancier that I finally settled on trying to just make it look somewhat like it could just be the top of the facade, and gradually the shape took its form.

A wall with a hat, even with the wording added above and below, felt still rather incomplete. From there I eventually got to adding the bull in a form much like that on the Fort Worth city flag. It was a small step from there to make it appear the hat was on the animal, something I thought would be a nice playful touch to go with the playful "Buckaroo" name. With the blue background I went with, stars under the arches seemed like a nice last touch. Five seemed good since there were 5 arches, even though Texas is the Lone Star State.

Overall, I was not too excited by this result. There is nothing on it saying "baseball". The facade goes with Fort Worth, but I hope I do not do many other logos like this. The secondary one with just the hat-wearing steer may be a better, simpler approach. My favorite of what I made now may be the letter design with the steer head and the Dodgers-esque flying ball.

[Eugene Church]

Excellent logos...I wondered if the building on Ft. Worth was the Stockyards.

The hat on the longhorn is a stoke of genius.

You do very fine work.

Thanks for sharing them with us...the Logo Pack Rats of OOTPB.

[littlechris1977]

What graphics program do you use GMO?

[gmo]

Though I will do some things like touching up details in Paint, in general I now use something called MS Picture It! Photo 2002, which was on my machine when I bought it a few years ago now. It allows for layering, and I now take full advantage of that. Also, I guess it is vector-based or whatever it is called that allows things like shapes to resize and usually still look good.

There are some things the program cannot do (or I have not figured out how to make it do) involving text, shapes, and lines that I wish it would. But it can do quite a bit, and I have gotten fairly comfortable with it.

[gmo]

Charlotte Cherokees - logo contest

Here are my various ideas. Versions in bmp format are included in a zip file in the following post after the description. The bmp versions are included because the jpg files suffer from some information loss due to compression.

[gmo]

Charlotte Cherokees continued...

My entry was guessed early on in voting thread. But what is considered my research in the design process could also be considered wild scrambling for ideas. In this case I had been thinking about using a field (quarter pie), so I had that to start possibly. At first I was thinking of doing something with the double "C" either stacked or interlocking some way. That was not going anywhere, but in my searching I came across the Cherokee nation web site. Immediately I knew I had my colors from there and that I would use the star, although admittedly I was unaware of the meaning of the symbol.

Though I liked the pieces, it took a long time to settle on a configuration and sizes of the text and symbols. The bats (they are supposed to be bats as it seemed there were some other interpretations) behind the field seems to be a relatively common thing to do with that shape, so I ended up trying to spruce that up with the attempt to evoke a feather at the end of the barrel and the symbols on the handle. I had thought of going with one bat/one feather or two feathers since those going to fight or to play their lacrosse-like ball game would wear a feather or two, but since that did not work I just decorated the bats.

There were other variations on the same theme, but I have only a couple here, one with the star enlarged and the "Baseball Club" text removed, and one with the star joined by a crown symbol used by the city of Charlotte. The crown is nice, but I preferred the star alone to it with the crown. The last version I really like as a non-primary logo like for a cap or jersey. Putting either the "C" or the baseball in the center of the star was natural since a circle fits there. The ball alone though makes the star look like a flower, and the "C" alone really accentuated the center where the dark line all converged. Together though, I really like it, except when shrunk the ball seams blur out.

As a group I am very pleased with these. But it did get me thinking about the use of symbols like the star and the crown in these logos. I think it is fine since this is all for our entertainment and not for real world teams. Plus, as I noted above I might not get ideas otherwise, and I also like working within a theme that way. But I can understand someone being critical of such designs since I could conceive that, for instance, neither the Cherokee nation nor the city of Charlotte would permit the use of almost exactly their symbols by a baseball club. Even if they could not stop it, I would wonder if some may protest plopping down a ball and a "C" on the star as I did in the one logo. This may be small potatoes compared to the debate about whether the nickname "Redskins" and some of the Cleveland Indians logos should be considered too offensive, but it was something that made me think.

[littlechris1977]

I really like your logos gmo. You probably put thought into yours than some others do...at least myself anyway. I typically use the same old round or square logo with some fancy text and a picture.

[Eugene Church]

gmo, you logos are extremely well done...and extremely well thought out.

Thanks for sharing them with us...and thanks for sharing your thoughts and reasons for the designs. I find them very interesting.

That "C" with the baseball and star symbol would look great on a cap.