The Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) want you to get your artistic juices flowing, and draw them a new logo, with a prize up for grabs for the one they choose and go on to use!
April of this year – the same month in which the Wakefield Show takes place (in Bradford) – marks the club’s 40th anniversary, and they are celebrating in a number of ways. One of those is to hold a competition to (hopefully) find a replacement for the club’s logo.
The logo, shown above, should be familiar to all RISC OS users by now, and even those who don’t recognise it as the WROCC logo (even with the textual part forming a clue) should recognise the core element – a large green acorn, based on the one used by Acorn Computers. The club was formed in 1983, with its first meeting taking place in April, and adopted the Wakefield BBC Micro User Group as their name, changing to the Wakefield Acorn Computer Group in 1991, then the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club in 2002.
The logo itself in its current form began life in 1993, though at that time took a more ‘flat’ form, and was replaced later the same year with a shaded one to give it a more 3-dimensional look. The only significant changes to it since have been to keep it up to date with the Club’s name.
Now, however, the Club has decided that the logo needs to be brought up to date – while Acorn’s legacy lives on in the RISC OS machines we now use, the company itself hasn’t existed in a quarter of a century, and the logo needs to reflect both the Club itself and the RISC OS scene today.
To enter the competition, all you have to do is email your design to them.
You can submit your entries in any bitmap format (for example as a RISC OS sprite, or a more generic format such as JPEG, GIF, or PNG), or as a vector graphic in either Draw or ArtWorks format. That doesn’t rule out using a vector graphics format on another platform at the design stage, however, because you can export your design as a bitmap and submit that.
The Club says that it doesn’t matter if your design isn’t a fully polished logo, ready to be used the instant it is selected as the winning entry – so you can be a little more rough than ready with what you produce. More important is the basic idea, because when they choose the winner, they’ll redraw (if necessary) it to a high standard in a suitable application.
The club notes that their name is integral to the current logo – forming part of it by wrapping around the central acorn. They say this isn’t a strict requirement for the competition entries, which should allow more flexibility and creativity, “but the name must appear somewhere.”
The closing date for the competition is 22nd April, 2023 – which happens to be the same date as the Wakefield Show. If they are still potentially receiving entries that day, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to judge them and announce a winner at the event – but perhaps they might be able to do so by the next meeting after that, which will be on 3rd May.
Should your entry be the one selected as the winner, you’ll receive a prize consisting of three parts: £50.00, a year’s free membership of the club (or an extension to an existing membership), and the ability to bask in the glory of knowing your design was the best!
