Thursday, October 21, 2021

BEHIND THE B4B LOGO...

Believe it or not, It took me about 10 years to finalize the very simple Bound4Burlingame(B4B) logo! For years I sketched, scribbled, and copy/pasted, often spending days on end experimenting with fonts, colors, shapes and graphics. In the end, I reverted to the simplest of logos. Despite the fact that many campers outside New England probably don't realize that Burlingame is a camping destination near the beaches of Rhode Island, it was still pretty important that my logo portrayed B4B's underlying identity and stood apart from RI DEM and/or the RI State Park Department logos.

When it all finally fell into place, it was like an "Oprah Ahh-ha Moment". I can't believe I wasted so much time and effort when the answer was passing me by on every road trip I took. What would be more obvious for a brand/social network logo, then one that closely resembled what most people already recognized as the universal symbol for campground? And so I ran with it. Okay...skipped.  That was right after I jumped for joy. Took long enough! I patted myself on the back and called it a decade. I wanted the B4B social pages to expand beyond the Burlingame camping population, to include all outdoor enthusiasts, so originally, I expanded the logo as well. I stuck with the simplicity and immediately settled on a "ROY G BIV" scheme. If you didn't attention in art class, its the color of the rainbow...Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.  If its good enough for Mother Nature and the Olympic Rings, it's good enough for me!  I fell in love with these crisp, vibrant and bold colors as a kid, and never outgrew them. (Kind of like my love for camping). I've since realized that a solo circle makes the biggest impact, but you'll occasionally still see colorful icons on our pages.

ONE OF BOUND4BURLINGAME'S FIRST LOGOS (2011):



THEN:

NOW:





It's doubtful B4B will ever be a known brand like Nike or Pepsi, so I have freedom to change it up a bit.  However, I found the key is to stick with easily recognizable icons across social media, the internet and advertising. Some early B4B devotees may remember when our tent was square, and our identity was a bit more complex. One of our early t-shirts featured an "eat-sleep-camp" design... a popular slogan which will return soon, I promise. Sometimes I do a little logo tweaking on our Pinterest, Facebook, Amazon storefront, and Twitter posts/accounts, so it grabs the attention of the followers and alerts them to a great gift idea, a neat DIY idea, or a product that B4B loves! All B4B YouTube videos are copyrighted with our logo too.

I love our B4B #redtentdistrict logo! (even if the tent is actually white and the circle red). As we grow and more campers join our B4B community, I wanted everyone to know what the B4B logo stands for and why it's the color/shape it is.

  **THE COLOR RED** Red is a strong, stimulating color that represents protection, excitement and energy. This color can create physical effects such as enhanced metabolism, increased enthusiasm, high levels of energy, and increased confidence. Red is assertive, daring, determined, powerful, enthusiastic, impulsive, exciting, and aggressive. Red represents physical energy, lust, passion, and desire. It symbolizes action, confidence, and courage. The color red is linked to the most primitive physical and emotional expressions needed for both survival and self-preservation. In feng shui, red is the most powerful color and supersedes all else. Pretty much sums up the soul of a camper!

**THE COLOR WHITE**  White creates a sense of space and is an inherently positive color. White is often associated with mental clarity, purity, innocence, light, goodness, calm, safety, brilliance, illumination, understanding, cleanliness, faith, beginnings, spirituality, possibility, humility, sincerity, protection, softness, and perfection. White refreshes one's soul. White is the feeling of camping.

**THE CIRCLE**  Roundness implies an idea of movement, travel, and symbolizes the cycle of time, the perpetual motion of everything that moves, the planets' journey around the sun, the circle of the zodiac, and the great rhythm of the universe. It symbolizes potential, or the embryo. It possesses a protective agent and indicates striving towards a psychic wholeness, self-realization and completeness.  For B4B, it also represents a campfire ring (our place of solace) and togetherness.  The joined circle is our camping community, a roundabout of friends bonded by the spirit of camping.

Did you know that we have group decals available at a minimal cost? Our B4B decals are 3" x 3" matte UV resistant vinyl. Waterproof & tearproof for outdoor/indoor use and will adhere to most surfaces. Peel and stick application. We have garden flags too! When new B4B swag becomes available, we announce it in the Private Facebook Group.

You'll notice that I've incorporated the B4B logo on our Facebook, the Private Facebook Group, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Blogger. I like to find clever ways to include it in posts and the graphics I create for our social media pages. This is for your entertainment (but mostly mine), but also a way to deter others from copying our content. Its FREE to belong to our community of campers. I just ask that you find, follow, like, comment, participate in, and share our Bound4Burlingame pages. Make sure your friends/family arrive at the correct pages/places by using the invite/share buttons and by mentioning our #redtentlogo and B4B directly. All links can can be found on the bound4burlingame.com website.

DID YOU KNOW? Many people have trouble remembering BOUND "4" BURLINGAME.com, so B4B owns all of the following domains and you they will redirect you to the right place!
  • www.bound4burlingame.com
  • www.boundforburlingame.com
  • www.burlingamestatepark.com
Please take a couple minutes and visit the "About Me, About B4B and our non-affiliation disclosure statement on the website page: https://bound4burlingame.com/about-bound4burlingame. If we haven't met in person yet, it will give you a little insight into who I am and how/why Bound4Burlingame was created.  And read through one of my very early blog post here of how it started: http://bound4burlingame.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-concept-of-bound4burlingame.html 

See you round the campfire!

#forcampersbycampers