Our logo design has been accepted as the official logo to one of the Canadian 12-and-under synchronized swimming teams participating in the ASUA/UANA Pan-American Synchro Championships this summer. Specifically, it will be used by "Team Alberta" at these games. This has been an interesting journey and I wanted to put some of it down on virtual paper.
Read on for
… the details.
Just as a preface, I've been using this site more as a CMS and have been deliberately avoiding using it as an actual blog. Mainly because I'm not particularly interested in broadcasting details of my life on ye olde intarwebs. However, I thought this was a slightly more interesting story, but that might be my bias showing. (Full Disclosure: My daughter is swimming on this team.)
Anyway.
After the Canadian Nationals meet for my daughter's synchro team in June, she was selected to be on the Canadian team at the Pan-American Games. As a result, there was a lot of organizing/scrambling/etc. to be done before the meet takes place (end of August). One of these tasks was to come up with a logo for the team. I didn't think too much about it at the time and I believe the original plan was to go with a generic maple leaf with text. While I didn't really plan on doing one, I did toy with some ideas by occasionally scribbling in the margins of my meeting notes at work.
Once I decided on the design, I passed it around to my family, who seemed to like it, so I drew a larger, 'cleaner' version on a typical piece of 8.5×11 sheet of printer paper. With a simple mechanical pencil. (i.e. no fancy art tools here!)
I briefly considered inking this with real ink (I have a nice set of technical pens that I often draw with), but decided it might be easier to do it digitally. So I then scanned it and worked on it in Photoshop.
Once complete, I fiddled with the colours. Obviously, the leaf had to be red, but what about the stylized map of the province? As it turns out, the predominant colour of our flag is a blue, so decided on that.
And to give it a bit of dimension, I added a couple of simple gradients that transition from white to the underlying colour. Ultimately, these were not used, but gradients seem to be popular in graphics work, generally. Also, after much fiddling around with fonts, I added in the text.
Once completed, I emailed it around to the team's parents and the coaches to get some feedback and any suggestions. The general consensus was that they liked it and I only had a few small suggested tweaks to incorporate. Once I had finished and sent around for some final thoughts, someone else had worked out some deals with a couple of local clothing and equipment 'branders' (not sure if there's a technical term for them). We worked with Big Mountain Active Wear for most of the clothing and Team Aquatic Supplies for the swimwear.
As it turns out, vector graphics are more the industry standard graphics format for this kind of work, so I did a crash course via google searches and grabbed a copy of Inkscape to do the conversion and tweaking. I sent the resulting files off to Big Mountain and Team Aquatic and eagerly awaited the results.
A couple of weeks later, and here they are!
The team swim bag:
The team practice suit:
The team T-shirts:
And the team jackets:
Can't wait to see them in use in a couple of weeks!
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