News — 25 January, 2011

The new HOT logo

It is my pleasure to present the new Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team logo:

Throughout December we held a logo design competition, inviting the community to put forward a logo for our organisation. Despite a fairly short deadline, we received lots of entries, and we were very impressed by the quality of the designs. We'd like to thank all the competition entrants for taking the time and applying their talents to come up with logo designs, but we had to pick one logo as the winner.

The task of picking a winner fell to the competition judges: Mikel Maron, Kate Chapman, Robert Soden, Nicolas Chavent, and Schuyler Erle. I presented the designs to them (without revealing the identity of the artists) They then deliberated and judged on various criteria before eventually picking this winner. The winning design is by Saman Bemel Benrud. Congratulations to him! Although less obviously conveying Humanitarian mapping than some other entries, it was felt that this design had the most striking impact in its elegant abstract simplicity. Saman described the logo as "an abstraction of map tiles. In general, I was going for an emblem-style logo inspired by iconic international aid logos"

This fantastic new logo can now be used by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in various places to present a more slick message and communicate our work with more stylish red spikey flair! The logo is available as SVG. We may use it with slight variations where necessary. In particular different text arrangements may be necessary. In fact we've experimented with a few variations, B was the original design from the artist. The judges preferred "OpenStreetMap" spelled out in full.

The other submitted designs can also be found via links on the wiki (plus more information on the competition and using the logo) Thanks again to all those who took part. If you're keen on logo design, but missed out on this, perhaps you'd like to check out the SotM conference logo design challenge running now. Thanks also go to the judges for taking on this tricky decision!