[Angeliukm]

Team 20 has made robot logos since 2014, taking our original inspiration from 118's Apex (2013). All of our past robot logos are attached here.

Historically, I've made the logos on my computer outside of build meetings. As a college student who can't justify a subscription to Adobe Illustrator, I used Inkscape. It's a free open source vector graphics program that I've found to be just as good as Illustrator in many respects, and it has my strong recommendation. It's very easy to pick up if you're already familiar with Illustrator or other vector graphics programs, and tutorials are readily available. If you'd like to use the Adobe software though, definitely look into getting an educational discount through your school.

In general, I would tend to avoid raster images for logos (the kind of file you work with in Photoshop: jpg, png, etc.) because they can be difficult to scale without pixelating unless the file is already large. For logos, where simplicity and scalability are key features, vector graphics work a lot better. We start our designs by typing out the robot's name in our designated robot font (Prototype), and sketch out logo designs from there. Using the same font gives the logos some uniformity year to year and makes them easier to pick out among the sponsor stickers on out robots. We also try to keep them monochrome and very simple to make them scalable, easy to print, and legible from the stands.