We’re coming out of the worst of the pandemic here, but while we were still fully hunkered down, our design team wanted to have a little fun outside of regular project constraints.  Back in spring, our colleagues at Bay State Design Shop, an informal organization for designers to congregate and collaborate, threw out a design challenge to members to revamp the National Park Service logo as a thought exercise.  We missed the deadline for review within the Bay State community, but wanted to take the time to turn out our own concepts for this classic and recognizable identity.  Excited by the challenge of how to refresh and modernize the Park Service’s look without losing connection with customers or falsely communicating a change of mission, we dug in and worked up some quick concepts. Take a look at two of our designers’ takes on a refactoring of the National Park Service logo.

Background

The National Park Service employs thousands of workers and volunteers across the country and it was important for us to conceive of a logo that could be easily transferred onto shirt badges and signposts and utilize natural elements such as stone or wood for display. Our goal was to simplify and improve the existing logo while also preserving key elements that define the old logo and are recognized by millions of people. Mountains, trees and wild animals are elements that we believe are important to the Park Service and represent the reason why millions of people visit our National Parks on a yearly basis. The bison is a very recognizable animal associated with the American wilderness across history—we felt it a requirement to keep it as the focal point of the logo, while creating a more solid and simple figure.

There were a few things we set out to fix with our concepts. The current logo is an illustration rather than a symbol, and as a result, it can't have a one-color version, and requires full-color treatment all the time. It's hard to read and recognize when rendered small, as its details get lost when used in circumstances that require it to be scaled down. The typographical treatments are also not designed to accommodate for all variations of wordmarks of the National Park Service.  With these things all in mind our concepts emerged.

Alex's Take

I designed an overall clean, simple mark that includes all the recognizable elements from the old logo. The logo depicts mountains, trees, and wild animals – important to the NPS with iconic Bison as a center figure for the mark. The typeface I chose was Rajdhani, a free Google font that is accessible to everyone for on-line and print applications.  This typeface has distinctive styles to create two-part wordmarks such as National Park Service and National Park Foundation. I used four colors to create a cohesive and recognizable color palette. The colors I chose are all variations of ones you might find when visiting a National Park. The sand-like color with hints of orange serves as the primary color, and the lighter cyan/forest green as a secondary color. From there, I modified the sand-like color to create the lighter tan and dark brown of the bison.

Kate's Take

I went with a versatile logo that can be used in black and white and multi-color, with dark and light backgrounds. My color choice was the earthy color palette to emphasize nature and a history-preserving mission. I also reworked the logo silhouette to be shield-shaped to emphasize the same point, and I employed a more symbolic rather than illustrative visual language. While preserving the overall logo idea I brought into focus an image of the emblematic American Bison and excluded some symbols, such as the redwood tree, specific to only some parks.  I applied consistent visual treatment (curves and strokes) to create the landscape and the Bison, and for typography I used D-Din Condense, a modern clean font, that I feel would be especially great for lengthy wordmarks and logotypes.

Hope you found the ideas interesting. Our team had fun working on a brand so valuable to the public in times like these, as so many people find the outdoors a refuge from the lockdown.  We’re looking forward to many a logo design in the future, as we work with our clients to build strong brands.