If your team is in need of a new logo design or wants to update your current one a little bit, I hope this helps lead you in the right direction.
What Makes A Great FRC Team Logo? LINK:http://www.frcnation.com/blog/2015/12/29/1bu1w3z3yh60fyv2mdpp7f6h35ziyn
If any new team needs help with designing a logo, email me at [email protected] and I will be glad to help.
Hope this helps someone out!
I absolutely agree with the post, (simple, memorable, enduring, versatile, appropriate) though I would add “distinct” - that is, it must not look like anyone else’s logo (FRC or otherwise), while obeying the others. That’s the real challenge.
I would also add (as a hopefully obvious feature, but apparently not based on the microsoft icons for notepad, calculator, word, and so on) “high contrast”. The logo should be distinctive re-done with nearby primary and secondary colors, even if it nominally has oddball colors in it. The old heraldic solution to this was to never put a “metal on metal” (silver/white on gold/yellow) or “color on color” (any of blue/red/purple/green/black against each other). You can probably relax this a little, but be sure that a colorblind person can see your logo’s shape.
I would say simple and large. You want to be uniquely identifiable from far away. People should be able to take one look at you and go “oh yes, that’s ___”, rather than “who are those guys? I can’t make out the logo on their shirt, and the team number is too small to read”.
Some teams have become known more by their numbers than their team name. E.g. We say 1114 and 610 more than Simbotics and Crescent Coyotes. If you know that’s how you want to be known (or it is already) then focus on making those numbers big and legible. I bet you can immediately picture the typeface and colors (white on red, white and green) of those teams I just mentioned. That’s what you want for your team.
Simpler, fewer colors also means cheaper to print, as screen printing companies charge you per ink color that you use, and often add setup fees for each color they need to create a silkscreen for.
Agreeing with what the others said about contrast and visibility, a good way to start with making a logo is to just take your team number and throw it around in a few fonts (preferably easy to read but bold/block lettering) and then see what kind of designs you can spring off of that.
Additionally, it helps to have the same font family used for both the name and the numbers, otherwise you will have a slight inconvenience when creating team documents because you’ll have to deal with two different fonts (doable, we use two different fonts, just something to take into consideration).
Rather than ‘large’ I might say ‘scalable’. You want the logo to be versatile enough to be recognizable when large but also recognizable when on something like a button or maybe shirt sleeve. Having a scalable logo is tough, and usually counter to what a new students first pass may be.
Also I can not stand when people do not produce logos as vectors…
Instead of having to remake the logo make it a vector from the start.
Simplicity is the key here, it needs to be simple but recognizable. We developed ours 4 years ago and have stuck with it since. We find no solid reason to change it, because we are recognized by it so easily. Ours is also very scale-able to a larger size.
I agree about the simplicity. Something that I like about our logo is that it’s shape can be easily recognized- I have yet to see a team with a logo that is similar to ours. This makes it much easier for us to be recognized at competition, and people can much more easily associate the logo with our team.
Additionally I’m happy that it has been around for so long. The CircuitRunner is just about 15 years old, and I’ve met many people-at competitions and doing outreach-who have seen our logo years ago and were still able to link it back to us.
Here’s our current version:
Great post.
Our team decided to “grow up” last season. I charged students to come up with a more refined logo.
Our original logo was a modified school logo, with a viking helmet and gears:
But it was very cartoony. So we moved to this logo:
Teams that knew us complemented the change. I think the students did a good job of reflecting where we are from (Marina logo) and what FRC is all about (gears, circuit, code)… and still managed to keep it fun.
I like it. It looks really nice when printed big. It would make a beautiful vinyl banner over your pit or a nice large logo on your T-shirts.
My only comment is that the new logo with multiple shields would be more difficult to make viewable small, such as on a button or even in the 1/2" tall preview you’ve attached to your post.
We arranged the shields in an arch for the buttons:
But yeah, can’t really read the code at 1.25" diameter 
When it comes to logo design, as mentioned above, simplicity and uniqueness is important.
When it comes to simplicity, the only exception should be for a mascot logo, but a simple secondary logo is HIGHLY recommended.
701 used to always used the Minnesota Viking logo, which is the logo used by the school, but with a green and gold scheme, instead of purple and gold. Aesthetically, this is no doubt a decent logo, but the issue I had was with uniqueness. How many other schools have this logo, and how many other viking themed teams have this logo? The simple answer is many! So I decided my rookie year on the team in 2010 to design a logo that was unique to 701 and only 701. The outcome of this was a mascot logo:
The full resolution picture is in attachments
For those with a keen eye, you may notice similarities between the basic design of this logo and 148’s mascot logo, and there’s no denying that this was the only logo that inspired the one I designed. Even considering this, the 701 mascot logo and the 148 mascot logo are VERY different.
Now, this logo is definitely not simple, and we have to carefully choose the colors to faithfully replicate the colors of the logo, but keep the cost of shirts and sweatshirts at a reasonable price.
Thus, we have two other logos (see attachments) that are simple and only consist of one color which we can easily change to anything in our color scheme: green, gold/yellow, gray, black, or white.
We have one logo that consists only of our team number. The font used is Bank Gothic, a very common font among other teams, so in order to have the uniqueness, I added the cross hairs in the zero character. It’s just two extra lines, but it makes all the difference, especially since it adds symbolism to the number logo. The cross hairs on the zero represent a couple things. Firstly, it represents precision in build quality and precision in communication skills. It also represents a spirit of persistence and visualizing future goals and meeting those goals. Basically, “keep your eye on your targets and hit them.” These are just a few values that I personally feel are important in conducting a team that seeks to inspire season after season.
The idea of adding only two lines that bring symbolism to our “701” logo is simple, but means a lot. This is something that should be considered for any simple logo. A logo may be simple and attractive, but if it doesn’t represent the values of its team in some way, it’s just a stamp, rather than a visual representation of the team’s identity and values. This type of symbolic creativity may be more demanding than the technical creativity of putting together a few shapes.
The last logo we have is a simplified mascot logo. It’s what we call the “Acorn With Horns” logo, since that’s what it looks like and we could not come up with a better name:D It originated from a design that I put on the battery holder plates on our 2012 robot, and we’ve used the same battery holder design since. The problem is that nobody sees this logo since it’s inside the robot, so I added it to our new team sweatshirt design.
The benefit of a simplified mascot logo is that it is an option for when the more complex mascot logo is not a good choice in designing something with production limitations such as shirts, signs, and pamphlets.
In 2015 i desgined the new sweatshirt (see attachments). The sweatshirt design was inspired by the sweatshirts of, yet again, 148. This sweatshirt combines all three of our official logos to make a sweatshirt design that is unique to our team, and thanks to the big fat number logo on the back, it is identifiable from a distance.
The last attached file is the design for our buttons, which combine our more complicated mascot logo with our more simple number logo. Imagine cutting the center of the image in a circle, and you have our team button.
