When we finally wrestled the URL www.olskoolsuzuki.info down from a dusty top shelf, blew away the cobwebs and relaunched the new site, we wanted the look and feel of the site to be familiar. We wanted loyal members who had been waiting patiently in the wilderness to get a sense they were coming home. We were careful with the colour scheme and we were very careful with the logo. Both got a refresh and a polish but not much more.
Five months later we couldn’t be happier with the way things have gone. The site is well on its way to 1000 members and we have over 3500 posts alone in the project section. We have kicked off our trader section, relaunched our Facebook page, bike of the month as well as updating the news pages and vault regularly.
So everything is perfect right? …..well not quite.
There is one thing that the Admin team have debated more than any other subject and that is the Jurassic Park inspired logo.
On one hand it is an iconic symbol of what OSS is and stands for. Instantly recognisable on any bike. It’s a symbol we have all taken to our heart. It is part of our identity as a group.
On the other hand it is also instantly recognisable because it was designed that way by a very well paid design company working for a multi-million pound film studio. In other words; it isn’t actually ours. While we can stop people using our URL which we own, we can’t copyright the logo because it isn’t ours. Anyone who ever uses the logo to produce merchandise will always run the risk ( no matter how small) of an intellectual property law suit by a very large film company. The risk increases the more widespread the logo is. Social media is able to do this more effectively than the website alone could 10 years ago. So in our view the risks are very real. We are also aware that for a long period of time when the site was down that merchandise and the logo became more about the t-shirts and the stickers than it did about the ethos behind the logo.
We have worked hard to reset the culture of the new site so the focus is back on the bikes and the builds. Now we want to reset the visual identity too. We want the logo to mean something again. We want the merchandise to be earned not just bought.
So with a great deal of careful consideration and a lot of soul searching we have decided that a mass extinction event for the dinosaur is the only real course of action. We have been working on a new and completely original design for the logo that will allow us to:
- Register a trade mark
- Make our own very limited runs of merchandise without fear of being taken to court
- Provide stickers for completed build thread bikes
- Sell merchandise at events
- Create specialist stickers for BOTM and OSS race bikes
- Use it whenever and wherever we want without having to watch our backs
Please stay tuned for the big reveal of the all new OSS logo and some background to the design very shortly.
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