How do team make a logo

[synth3tk]

As someone who came from a team with little funding, I'll also echo the "stick with solid colors" suggestion. There's a lot of ways for you to get fancy and creative while keeping your printing costs under $50/shirt.

Drawing it as a vector format is a huge bonus. Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator can both do this. The advantage is that you have one file, and can enlarge it for banners and shrink it for buttons, all without actually touching the file. It does take a bit of learning to do, though.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

As someone who came from a team with little funding, I'll also echo the "stick with solid colors" suggestion. There's a lot of ways for you to get fancy and creative while keeping your printing costs under $50/shirt.

With a simple enough logo there's no reason you can't keep it under $25 a shirt.

[Boe]

heres my teams logo,
http://fightingcalculators.com/about/about-us/
it was before my time but im pretty sure we made our team name and then drew this in paint, and well it stuck and we all love it

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by dcarr

With a simple enough logo there's no reason you can't keep it under $25 a shirt.

That's what I meant. My original design would have cost us $50 for each shirt. After some tips from the printers, I managed to get it to around $20 per shirt.

[jwallace15]

I like your logo. But if you'd ever need to redesign it, I'd try to create a logo that is solid around the outside instead of faded... Because if you ever need to change the background colour, it would take time to change the outside colour because you'd need to change the colour of all the different shades around the outside of it. A fade to white has different colours than a fade to green. Don't believe me? Look at the picture below. I tried to change our logo from a white background to a green one. Notice the white shading around it? You'd need to either make all those white spots green, or completely redo all your shading.

[Jacob.B]

I really like the logo and the colors. It is more of a modern logo, unlike ours..

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by jwallace15

I like your logo. But if you'd ever need to redesign it, I'd try to create a logo that is solid around the outside instead of faded... Because if you ever need to change the background colour, it would take time to change the outside colour because you'd need to change the colour of all the different shades around the outside of it. A fade to white has different colours than a fade to green. Don't believe me? Look at the picture below. I tried to change our logo from a white background to a green one. Notice the white shading around it? You'd need to either make all those white spots green, or completely redo all your shading.

And that's why we only use the shaded logo sparingly, like on our website, and even then it's in vector format and assisted by our Photoshop ninja to make it look good. We have a simpler blue/white or orange/white that we use for most applications.

And a note as to the importance of the vector format: last year we bought graphics for our trailer. We tried to put our small logo on the front side of the trailer, and blowing it up made it so wiggly that we had to take it off and get it vectorized, before buying a new graphic.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by jwallace15

I like your logo. But if you'd ever need to redesign it, I'd try to create a logo that is solid around the outside instead of faded... Because if you ever need to change the background colour, it would take time to change the outside colour because you'd need to change the colour of all the different shades around the outside of it. A fade to white has different colours than a fade to green. Don't believe me? Look at the picture below. I tried to change our logo from a white background to a green one. Notice the white shading around it? You'd need to either make all those white spots green, or completely redo all your shading.

If you are working with the jpg image this makes sense but if you work with a PSD file (or an Illustrator one as would be preferred) changing background colors is fairly easy since they should be on different layers. Alternatively you can store it as a .png with a transparency channel and then overlay it onto your background color that way.

[trilogy2826]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

That's what I meant. My original design would have cost us $50 for each shirt. After some tips from the printers, I managed to get it to around $20 per shirt.

Is this the cost of your t-shirts? If so, I think you need to shop around a lot more. 2826 gets 2 t-shirts in our "Caribbean blue" color with: six color screen, single color full back and one sleeve and 1 polo in the same blue with an embroidered 4 color 3" logo all for $30. The shirts are pretty nice quality, so we aren't skimping.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by trilogy2826

Is this the cost of your t-shirts? If so, I think you need to shop around a lot more. 2826 gets 2 t-shirts in our "Caribbean blue" color with: six color screen, single color full back and one sleeve and 1 polo in the same blue with an embroidered 4 color 3" logo all for $30. The shirts are pretty nice quality, so we aren't skimping.

Wow that's really good...is this from an online vendor or a local shop? And is this a standard rate, or a special deal for the team?

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by dcarr

Wow that's really good...is this from an online vendor or a local shop? And is this a standard rate, or a special deal for the team?

After a tip from Libby Kamen, 2815 has used RushOrderTees.com for our 2011 and 2012 team shirts, plus the SCRIW volunteer shirts. For our 2011 shirt, we paid $9.07 per shirt for 50*. Don't have the invoice for our 2012 shirts, but the SCRIW shirts (70, one-sided) ran us $6.58 on a lighter shirt than we use for the team shirts (which, obviously, see more use).

You'll notice that our shirts are very simple--the 2012 shirt was the most extravagant with two colors on each side--but they still work for us! In any case, make sure you've got a one-color (or, if you absolutely must, two-color) version of your logo for print uses.

*We actually paid a bit more for rush shipping; we drug our feet a bit on the design. But that was poor planning on our part and not a reflection on RushOrderTees.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Billfred

After a tip from Libby Kamen, 2815 has used RushOrderTees.com for our 2011 and 2012 team shirts, plus the SCRIW volunteer shirts. For our 2011 shirt, we paid $9.07 per shirt for 50*. Don't have the invoice for our 2012 shirts, but the SCRIW shirts (70, one-sided) ran us $6.58 on a lighter shirt than we use for the team shirts (which, obviously, see more use).

You'll notice that our shirts are very simple--the 2012 shirt was the most extravagant with two colors on each side--but they still work for us! In any case, make sure you've got a one-color (or, if you absolutely must, two-color) version of your logo for print uses.

*We actually paid a bit more for rush shipping; we drug our feet a bit on the design. But that was poor planning on our part and not a reflection on RushOrderTees.

^ THIS THIS THIS!

RushOrderTees helped 1923 in 2007/2008 when we were in a very very serious bind. As in, it was two days before competition and we didn't have shirts. (There was a lot of drama going on.)

After about 20 minutes of crying hysterically to Mike (mike@rushordertees.com) on the phone, about how my team was falling apart and it was my dream to have a team at my school and oh god everything is awful (I was 15 at the time... ) he worked with me to get our tshirts designed, and we had them the next day.

Since then, I've recommended RushOrder for every application I've ever needed apparel for. 1923 still uses them, 229 & 4124 use them, Clarkson's A Capella group used them, even Brunswick Eruption's volunteer shirts are from them.

They are nothing short of amazing. They also will work with you to optimize your artwork, and send you .psd and .jpg copies of everything when they're done!

If you use them, tell Mike I sent you- he loves FIRST teams now.

[dcarr]

I'm not sure if this is something that other teams have run into, but at our school, all shirts/team wear must be approved by our Director of Communications/Marketing and then ordered through our school's Retail Operations (which handles the rest of the school's gear). As a result we are limited to one company which doesn't offer the best deals and isn't very fast.

In fact, it took some effort just to get our own logo approved - most organizations at the school are just supposed to use the main logo for the school accompanied by their org name.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by trilogy2826

Is this the cost of your t-shirts?

Yes. See below:

Originally Posted by dcarr

I'm not sure if this is something that other teams have run into, but at our school, all shirts/team wear must be approved by our Director of Communications/Marketing and then ordered through our school's Retail Operations (which handles the rest of the school's gear). As a result we are limited to one company which doesn't offer the best deals and isn't very fast.

This. I had lower quotes through various online retailers, but my old district was very strict with our funding. They told us that in order for our team money to pay for the shirts, we had to use the district's supplier.

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by dcarr

I'm not sure if this is something that other teams have run into, but at our school, all shirts/team wear must be approved by our Director of Communications/Marketing and then ordered through our school's Retail Operations (which handles the rest of the school's gear). As a result we are limited to one company which doesn't offer the best deals and isn't very fast.

In fact, it took some effort just to get our own logo approved - most organizations at the school are just supposed to use the main logo for the school accompanied by their org name.

We run a very fine line of our own. Our team is rather entwined with the University of South Carolina (we build in their shop, we work their football games as a fundraiser, we paint the robots garnet and black), who naturally has a lot of rules surrounding use and production of their logos. This all comes with a side order of NCAA rules; we once had a loaned pennant that absolutely under no circumstances could go home with a student since it was purchased with USC athletic department funds. And then there are less restrictive rules for student organizations on campus (we have one for our college mentors), but then we have people outside that student organization (the kids, the teachers, me) that would wind up with the shirts.

You'll notice that we're very cautious to avoid those marks.