Discussion: logo contest

Given the intense interest in the recent search for a new OUSA logo, the organizing committee for the 2012 North American Orienteering Championships has decided to hold a contest for an event logo. The designer of the winning logo will receive either free entry to the 2012 NAOC events or a $75 gift certificate. Please go to www.naoc2012.org and click on "Submit a Logo" for more details.

Since the orienteering community is not known for graphic design skills, I hope that this contest is posed to some segment of the graphic design community, maybe to an art & design school or something. (Another option would be to use CrowdSpring, or something similar.)

It would be useful to know what the required elements are. From the current submissions, all of them say "NAOC 2012", two of them refer to the location, one of them refers to a more specific event name (is that the official event name?). None of them refer to specific dates. It would be a shame if the best graphic design wasn't chosen because it didn't show all of the desired information, or it was in a color scheme that the selection committee didn't like.

Also, from the contest webpage, there a sentence that refers to DVOA's bid, but there's no link.

Here is a link to the bid:
http://www.sju.edu/~sfillebr/Orienteering/NAOC2012...

It will be fixed on the contest webpage shortly.

If anyone from the orienteering community is serious about this logo design contest, I'd recommend reading this tutorial which concentrates on the most applicable phase of the logo design process.

(This is one chapter from a book about logo design, made available for free by the author).

I've certainly found this tutorial helpful with my logo design projects.

Of course there is another approach to a logo contest, from start to finish in 11 hours. :-)

Which reminds me, I never donated the two Andrew Jacksons to the Team. Will be in the mail tomorrow.

Well, the winning corn maze design had about 40+ hours of design work done prior to the start of those 11 hours... so that's not entirely true. It doesn't take very long to change some colors and to find some clipart of an ear of corn. :-)

Hope it gets a better reception than this new Big 10 12 logo

I don't have a problem with the new Big 10 logo... it just seems that the interwebs always spew all sorts of hate towards rebranding efforts.

It lacks the cleverness of the previous Big 10 logo, but it's fresh (and really, you can't hide a 12 in there). It's not as good as the new Pac 10 logo, but it's not the disaster that all of the armchair designers are complaining about.

My favorite rebranding effort of 2010 is from Norway. It doesn't have anything to do with what's been said here, though.

I think why the Big 10 logo feels so bad to me is that it literally forces you to look at the negative space. But in this case, the negative space was a really inconsistent mixture of smooth curvilinears and computer era blockiness, including what looks like an Atari character hidden between the letters.

And all of the football junkies noticed these problems right away, once they started looking for the hidden #12, that turned out to be just an extra #10.