This weekend I spent some time developing some logo options for the DFW Contest Group. This group started up perhaps a year or more ago with just a small group of guys getting together over dinner once a month to discuss ham radio contesting. Eric, NM5M, is the chief organizer along with George, N5UI, developing the great supporting website. Over the last few months the membership has grown a great deal and the club has started to enter a few contests as a club. It recently obtained ARRL club status. So it’s moving along at a nice pace in it’s development.
This 
past week, George sent out the call for some help on developing logos and provided a few examples for discussion by the group. Watching the discussion, I couldn’t help but weigh in with a few examples to help move the cause along. I provided about 10 variations and two of my favorites shown here.
The boot option emulated George’s original logo for the club that he used on the website. A general consensus from the group is that it is a nice departure from some of the other Texas club logos that are out there. I then worked with George to find a good vector based image from iStock Photo that I could purchase and develop into a logo for the club. I like the play on text around the Contest Group type. The reason the letters TEST are larger is that this is the message that is sent in Morse Code during a contest to indicate that you are calling other stations that are participating in the TEST.
George 
had also done some development work around a Texas flag. So I decided to try my hand at that approach as well. It turned out that the Contest Group type played more prominently in the flag image, with the text showing horizontally rather than vertically. So I did some more tweaks on the text to really emphasize the TEST aspects. Then I had a little creative license around the star in the flag, enlarging it to make the image more edgy. It turned out to by my favorite. I’m hoping that we’ll go into voting for the final image and in this way try to get everyone’s opinion into the selection process.
Let me know what you think.
