ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOT WHEELERS CLUB

Lately, I have been spending a lot of my time (and my money) on a hobby that takes me back to the time when I was a child growing up in Littleton, Colorado. There were many things that I was interested in as a kid, Godzilla, monster movies, comic books, Godzilla, my Mongoose BMX bike, skateboarding, Godzilla, and last but not least Hot Wheels. For some reason those little die-cast cars have found a place back in my life after more than 30 years. I haven't really figured out why my interest has gone back to collecting these little cars. Maybe it is those memories I still have from when I was a child..... or maybe it is the thrill of the hunt to find those rare and hard to find cars..... or maybe it is just the aesthetics of the die-cast cars..... or maybe I am in some sort of mid-life crisis.....

Anyway, due to this passion I have for collecting these little cars, I decided to search the internet to see if there were any other collectors here in Colorado that share this same addictive hobby. That search led me to the Rocky Mountain Hot Wheelers Club web page. I found out that they had meetings once a month, usually on the third Saturday. One weekend in June I decided to attend just one of the meetings and enjoyed it so much that I have been a member since. The club is run by a great bunch of guys and it has been a great place to meet others that share the same interest in the cars as I do, and to learn more about the hobby of collecting and the history of all of the Hot Wheels cars.

Six months after I had joined the club, the Club decided that they needed to re-design the existing Club logo and decided to make it into a contest for all of the club members. The original logo was an adaptation of the actual Hot Wheels logo, the logo had the same design of the very famous Hot Wheels logo but changed the letters that were inside of the flame to read "Hot Wheelers" instead of "Hot Wheels". I guess Mattel wasn't very happy with this design of the club logo and asked them to quit using it.

I thought that it might be fun to enter the logo design contest and create a new logo for the club. This wasn't as easy as I thought that it was going to be. First, I had to figure out a design that would be dynamic and be elegant at the same time. I knew that there was going to be a "Wheel" somewhere in the design, but I wasn't quite sure where. And I knew that I wanted to have some pin-striping incorporated into the design. I also wanted to see if I could add some "action" or "motion" to different elements of the design. I sat down with a ball point pen, pencil and the back of an envelope and I started sketching.


(click on image to enlarge)


(click on image to enlarge)

Once I got a good feeling for the visual and figured out what would go where, I took my very rough sketch and scanned it into the computer and started to refine the ideas that I had put down on paper. I thought the best and cleanest way to do this was create the logo in Adobe Illustrator. I thought about doing the color for this logo in Photoshop, but Photoshop can be very limiting since the image is rasterized. That makes it difficult especially if this logo might be used on anything from a 5x3 banner, to a small sticker due what happens when the pixels in a rasterized image are scaled to a large or very small size. I really needed the logo artwork to hold up for all of the uses it might be needed for.

Below is what I came up for the final versions of the logo. I wanted to come up with something that was unique but still looked like it had a fun Hot Rod influence. I am really pleased with how this design came out.


(click on image to enlarge)


(click on image to enlarge)


(click on image to enlarge)


(click on image to enlarge)


(click on image to enlarge)

Out of the ten other entries that were submitted for the contest, I was fortunate enough to have been selected the winner of the logo design contest. I had a real great time designing and illustrating this logo. It was really nice to get to work on a project that brought back a lot of the memories of when I was young and happy collecting all of those little cars.

Enjoy,

Jack

Also, if you collect Hot Wheels, live in the Denver area and would be interested in joining the RMHWC, please reply to this thread and I will get you information on how to join, or you can visit the direct link on the right-hand side of this page.