I’ve felt like a kid on Christmas Eve as I’ve waited to see our new team logo.  The excitement and anticipation have been killing me!  However, I never imagined it could be such an involved and amazing process.  Below, you’ll read about our journey to create a team logo.  If you don’t care about that and just want to see the new logo, then go ahead and scroll down…

You scrolled down immediately and then came back to read this, didn’t you?  Right?  C’mon… Tell the truth.  That’s okay.  I would’ve done the same thing.  Now, on with our story.

It all started back in May when I asked on facebook if anyone could help us with a logo.  My friend Mindy, from Dreaming Tree Creative, just happens to do this for a living.  She said she could help us out.  To give her an idea of what we were looking for, I posted:

“I was thinking you could use a huge, muscular Clydesdale horse in full armor, holding a bazooka in one hand and an ice-cold beer in the other, while riding a mountain bike with wings on it and a rocket underneath. What do you think?”

Of course I was kidding…  Sort of.  Then we both got really busy over the summer with our kids, vacations, camping, and life in general. It wasn’t until sometime in early October that we got motivated to finish a logo so  we could get some cool jerseys made before next spring (jerseys usually take 6-8 weeks to make).

As a team, we tossed around some ideas and talked about what we wanted.  Casey even had a dream where he came up with the “perfect” logo.  He tried to describe it to us, but we couldn’t quite picture it.  So he created this:

A little too busy?

Not too bad considering he has no training in this area.  I was actually kind of impressed with his logo, but it seemed a little too busy.  On top of that, most adventure racing teams have a logo containing a compass, bike tire, climbers, and/or a paddle in some configuration or another.  So we decided to keep trying. We wanted to stand out.

I kind of tinkered around online with some do-it-yourself logo design sites.  If you’ve never tried any of these,  onsider yourself lucky.  What a waste of time!  It was kind of like some amateur idiot was hacking his way through a crappy logo design… Oh wait, that’s exactly what it was.  It didn’t take long for me to contact Mindy again.

She said she was on board and ready to go.  She sent me a packet of info and questions to help us figure out what we wanted, and I sent it to the rest of the team.  This really helped us focus on what we did and didn’t want for our logo.  We were completely lost before going through everything Mindy had sent us.  Even though we were more focused, I’m afraid we still weren’t much help.

Here are just a few of the gems we offered Mindy:

• “What about a cartoonized muscular figure jumping over a log with a cartoonized overlay of Otis’s {My 18-month-old son} smiling face.  It’s a combination of masculinity with childlike enthusiasm.  Maybe put a weapon in his hand?  What if we had him running toward a dinner bell?  Masculinity, childlike enthusiasm, and our logo is hauling ass thru the woods to get home for dinner.” – Bob Jenkins

• “What about Atlas holding up a compass rose?” – Zack Lamb

• “The morning star is a symbol of hope – maybe we could use that.  It’s also a badass weapon that would look cool.” – Yours Truly

• “The morning star is also a sign of the coming dawn and rising sun… a great feeling after 24+ hours of racing I would imagine.” – Casey Lamb (who hadn’t yet done a 24 hour race at the time)

• “I like the simpler logos kind of like Team Torti or Google. We can add paddles and bikes and beer cans to the name depending on the occasion.” – Drew West

Clearly, we were still all over the place, but we answered her questions to the best of our ability.  We also gave her the colors we liked: Black, Gray, & Red.   Finally, we gave her our team mottos: “Fun is Better than Fast” and “Strength and Honor” (from the fine film Gladiator and brought to our attention by the one and only Robby Brown).

We then sent all the info to Mindy to let her do her thang.  She somehow made sense of our mumbo jumbo, and it didn’t take her very long to send us six SUH-WEET logo concepts (found right here – Seriously, take a look at these).

To say we merely liked them is kind of like saying Casey might occasionally say slightly inappropriate comments during races (if you’ve ever raced with Casey, then you know what I’m talking about).  We were absolutely blown away.  However, at this point we had a new problem.  We had to figure out what elements of each we liked best and how to combine them into the logo of our dreams.

Here is a breakdown of what we thought of the first 6 logo concepts starting with #1 (upper left hand corner) and ending with #6 (lower right hand corner):

Logo #1:
We loved the oval shape and how the wording protruded from the sides.  The boot print looked cool, but it didn’t quite reflect adventure racing the way we wanted. This was probably our 3rd favorite.

Logo #2:
We also loved this one.  The diamond shape was different from most other adventure racing logos we had seen.  We liked the small morning star above the “S”, and the color scheme looked great.  We aren’t exactly the best runners in the world (excluding our two non-husky members Drew and Darin), and we felt that runners on an adventure racing logo didn’t quite fit.  This one was definitely in our top 2, though.

Logo #3:
This one was probably our least favorite, although we still liked it.  We just felt like it was a little too pretentious to show a buff dude flexing, and it seemed like no one would take us seriously (although we are rarely very serious).

Logo #4:
We also all loved this one.  It was simple, and it still looked great.  It contained both of our mottos, but after seeing “Fun is Better than Fast” on an actual logo, we decided that it might send the wrong message.  While we’re all about the experience and having fun, we didn’t want to seem like that’s all we cared about.  We were still not sure about the boot print, and it seemed like a lot of teams have a circular logo.  This was the other one in our top 2.

Logo #5:
This one looks terrific.  While we liked the simplicity of the black and white as well as the large “V”, which could be quite easily recognized and associated with Virtus, we felt like this one was too formal for our team.

Logo #6:
This logo was also fantastic.  We loved how the red “V” made up the frame of the bike.  It also kind of looked like an owl’s eyes staring at you, and let’s be honest… Who doesn’t like hooters?  If we were a biking only team, then this would have been our logo without any changes.  As an adventure racing team, though, we thought we needed something else.

So, you can see why this was much harder than I had ever imagined.  We all got feedback from our wives or girlfriends, kids (my kids all liked the dude flexing), parents, and friends.  After much bantering back and forth, a couple of arguments, a beer-pong tournament, and one fist-fight/mud-wrestling match (okay, I might have made that up), we all agreed that we liked the diamond logo (logo #2) the best.  However, we wanted to replace the runners with something else – the morning star.

Mindy worked her magic, and sent us These three updated logos to look at.  Once again, we were blown away.  Using the morning star in place of the runners was just what we were looking for.  The third one seemed too bright, so that one was out of the running right away.  We all loved the top two, and we were torn about which one to use.  Here’s what Bob had to say in an email:

“I like the top one, scratch that… I f***ing love the top one.  This chick is awesome. I like the red too, I just like the black/white a little better.  I’d be ecstatic with either one.”

I felt the same way. The top one was so simple in black and white, but the more we thought about and discussed it, the more we thought we should have some color in it.  Plus, we can always use the black and white one when it’s appropriate. There was one more thing, though. After more bantering and gathering more opinions from family and friends, we realized that the red color seemed a bit orange-ish.

So, we hit Mindy up for one more change – a darker red, sort of crimson, instead of the red/orange.  Yet again, she amazed us.  We loved it!!!  We now had our new, amazingly fantastic logo.  Wanna see it?  Well, I know you already cheated and scrolled down here to see it before reading this, but that’s okay.

Without further ado… To you I proudly present the Officially Official Team Virtus Logo:

And here it is as a PDF so you can print it out and frame it, hang it on your wall, place it on your desk, and/or put it in your wallet to carry it with you forever.  You know you want to.

So there you have it.  Although creating a logo was a bigger challenge than I had ever imagined, it was a fun and exciting process.  We could not be happier or more impressed with Mindy at Dreaming Tree Creative.  She was able to handle the chaotic mess of information from all of us at Team Virtus.  She put up with our foolishness and ridiculous requests.  She handled the revisions with ease.  She took everything we offered her and somehow created awesomeness out of it.  And she did it all quickly and with a smile on her face.  She was utterly amazing.  A HUGE THANKS to Mindy!  There is NO WAY we could have done this without her.  If you need a logo, a website, or any other design project then you need to contact Mindy.  You can thank me later.

So, please let us know what you think of the logo.  Love it?  Hate it?  Wish it was yours?  Want to get it tattooed on your left butt cheek?  We’d love to hear your opinions.

Until next time… Ciao.