Discussion: World Orienteering Week

Today I saw notice of the new World Orienteering Week logo.

Can anyone explain how the new World Orienteering Week logo in any way relates to orienteering? There is no orienteering flag. No contours or map. No north arrow or representation of a compass. How does a face with multi-colored stripes have anything to do with orienteering? Not even symbol of a runner or icon of any other form of orienteering (bike, ski, trail-O). The colors have no relation to those used on an orienteering map.

The design looks like it should be some sort of logo for LGBT… awareness organization. We should welcome EVERYBODY to orienteering, regardless of preferences (or race, religion, ethnicity, …) But orienteering is not ABOUT those things. It is about navigating with a map. Can we please come up with a logo that has at least some relation to what we are trying to promote?

Not everything with bright happy colors has an agenda. These colors and the face have been around since the first WOD in 2016, represent different areas on the globe, and there is a compass/sun dial in the O of WOW. There is a runner silhouette in a variation of the face logo in the tab logo of the website, also visible on the OCAD promotion/sponsorship of WOW. runner can also be seen in the face on the shirts.

Go to the source,
https://worldorienteeringday.com/index.php/wow-new...

WOW – new logo
November 20, 2023

World Orienteering Week have a new logo.
New, but at the same time with clear traces of the old. And that is precisely what we want to achieve. A little new but still the same.
The last two years World Orienteering Day has been organised for a hole week, to give the chance for every one to take part. And now the step has been taken to rename it! Finally some of you may say! With the new name I hope that you all take the chance to be part during WOW.

I like the new name. (Finally)

But the logo certainly does not scream “orienteering”. It could do way better to reflect what we are about. At first glance, I agree with C that it has almost no visible relation to our sport. The symbols Andrea mentions are way too subtle to make the connection. If avid orienteers don’t see the connection, the general public certainly won’t.

I sent an email to the IOF about 5 years ago suggesting "WOW" would be a better acronym than "WOD" especially as the races were not all on one day. I assume I'm not the only one, but I'm glad they finally listened to the obvious :-)

As to the logo I also agree. I don't see the left hand side as particularly LGBT, but it is totally generic and could equally represent the World Meteorological Organisation or the World Federation of Orthodontists (both of whom incidentally also have dreadful logos, imho).

Is it too late to change? The blurb doesn't really explain the thinking behind the logo except that "it's a little bit old, a little bit new".

I'm sure Blair has a view here...?

Why should the logo scream orienteering?

People new to orienteering aren't looing for orienteering per se. They are looking for what orienteering provides them. That might be a sense of community, a sense of adventure, connection to nature, a new challenge, etc. That is what the logo needs to convey. A person running with a map isn't a meaningful icon to most outside of those already into orienteering and that's not the target audience. Folks on this forum are not the target audience.

The logo conveys a people-oriented organization/effort through the face, a multicultural organization/effort, through the colours, and a sense of motion/action, through the pennants. From a design perspective that checks a lot of boxes. Whether you intuitively like it or not is a different matter.

Besides which, the WOD text icon includes the word orienteering and the O is a compass so there is your more literal/traditional orienteering iconography.

A "hole" week?

That may be the most obvious, but certainly not the only place where that page could use some editing. Clearly not the product of someone whose first language is English.

To me the logo doesn't convey any of these ideas suggested by Canadian "a sense of adventure, connection to nature, a new challenge,". Sense of community, maybe. I don't really get the sense of motion / movement or action from it. The color swaths are a little bit too abstract for me to have recognized them as pennants. I totally missed the compass in the O.

For those naive ---these days an international sport is continuation of politics by other means. The Agenda must be present and visible. See andreais's comment below as an illustration.

@Mike, I called them pennants because that's what I saw in the triangular shape. That's not the point. The point is it's a series of horizontal shapes with gradients that naturally draw the eye from left to right thus conveying motion.

I didn't mean to imply that the logo was conveying those particular things. My point was more academic that a logo generally should draw an emotional connection rather than a literal one. Whether this logo successfully does that or not is clearly a matter for debate. :)

nice to see the use of the WOW face logo to reflect youth orienteering development more broadly across various IOF efforts within IOF for outreach and youth efforts, where the colored face with the O-runner silhouette is now also a part of the title for the IOF Young Leaders Academy 2024 website

The only “agenda” should be Promote Orienteering.

I’m not very good with visuals and aesthetics, but the logo for WOW is a lot more literally about the product (there’s a compass in it!) than any of the world’s most recognizable logos are about their product. Have any of the people complaining about the WOW logo ever looked at Nike’s logo? Shell? Pepsi? Google? McDonald’s?

As Canadian said, logos are not about literal representation, and we should be very thankful for that in orienteering.

I like what Canadian stated.

On the logo topic, WOW is part of the IOF. Care to share your thoughts about the IOF logo?

Discuss.

Seems embedded in fantasy with a gnome hat and the Eye of Sauron featuring prominently. Assume the F relates to Frodo somehow.