der Bayerische July/August 2020 - 6

The National Capital Chapter Logos:
Past and Present

Out with The Old, In with The New.
The National Capital Chapter Has a New Logo.
By Raine Mantysalo

Early 1970s

Late 1980s

1996

2010

2020

All of the Chapter programs will have
their own identifying logos. With the
exclusion of the BMW roundel, they do
not need to comply with the guidelines.

6

The ride with the Capitol car is over.
What was once designed as a logo for the 1996 Oktoberfest
hosted by our chapter, was modified and became part of the new
NCC logo around 2010. After some ten years of use, it seemed
that it was time to refresh and modernize what many thought was
an "artsy" logo with a cartoon-like presentation of the Capitol
building as a car.
As a person who initially worked on the version of the logo
adopted in 2010, I volunteered for the new task.
There were some prerequisites for the new design.
The guidelines established by BMW AG needed to be
followed in order for us to be allowed to use the BMW roundel
as part of the new logo. A template with strict measurements
was provided.
There were additional requirements from our Chapter's
Board. In some way, the tri-color ///M stripes and the Capitol
building needed to be retained. The building was to be included
to identify our chapter's region. The logo needed to be not only
visually simple and easy to reproduce on various materials,
but also easily recognizable.
Various concepts were developed during what I would call
the "apples and oranges" stage. It allows different conceptual
approaches to be evaluated to provide direction to the effort.
During this stage one of them is usually chosen for further
development.
The chosen approach was further developed and three
versions of it with slight variations were then presented to be
voted on by the Board and by the leaders of our various
programs. After all the votes were counted, the selected logo
was approved and finalized.
As you can see the Capitol building has been part of
the logo since the founding of the Chapter in the early 1970s.
The rendering of it in the new logo was never intended to be
a "brick-by-brick" drawing of the building; it is rather a
stylized and simplified representation. Including all the minute
architectural details of the structure would have been impossible
to reproduce in various applications.
Incidentally, it was brought to our attention just recently that
the name of the chapter had to be in the same font size as the
name of the national organization. Therefore for the resized
name of the chapter to fit in, the new logo needed to be wider
than the previous one. To our knowledge, this was never an
issue during the approval process a decade ago. It was always
understood that the logo had been approved as it has been in
use for all these years.
We hope that the new logo will be well received and that
it will do a good job identifying and promoting the largest
chapter in the BMW Car Club of America.
derBayerische
https://www.nccbmwcca.org/
der Bayerische July/August 2020

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