San Marin High School will be seeing a new mustang on its logo. Athletic director Dennis Davis led the revamping of the San Marin sports logo, which now has the interlocked SM and the original San Marin mustang. It was designed through a company called 99designs.
“My goal was to preserve the history of the school by adding a modern, clean look to it. That way when people order shirts or hats, everything looks the same,” Davis said. “San Marin has its identity.”
He made sure to keep the interlocked S and M design, because it is already widely-used by the sports teams and school. He wanted to focus on unifying the horse figure that will be used along with the SM design, as it is the historical mustang of San Marin, he said
Davis said he wanted to come up with a San Marin mustang that doesn’t belong to any other schools. The array of mustangs currently used throughout the school and sports teams come from different colleges and universities, including Southern Methodist University, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Boise State University.
The athletics department played a big part in taking the first step to redoing the logo, and Sports Boosters helped raise money to fund the project, he said.
Davis used 99designs, a graphic design company with headquarters in Oakland, to create the logo. He first told the company what he was looking for in the logo, then designers from all over the world could come up with ideas for the logo. The company formats the process as a contest, paying the artist who creates the chosen logo.
To get an idea of what people wanted, Davis had coaches, the sports boosters and 40 randomly-chosen students rate six of the designs he received from the company on a scale of one to six, from the one they liked the most to the least. He said that the results came back overwhelmingly for two of the designs, and it was clear one of the two would be the new logo of San Marin.
“We’ve got opinions from lots of different people — from people who have been at the school for 40 years, to people who are brand new at the school. We’ve tried to have a lot of stakeholders invested,” Davis said.
On Friday October 2, Davis opened the vote up to the entire school through the Voting 4 Schools website, which has been used multiple times by leadership this school year to collect votes. Davis said coaches did not have a strong preference between the two and chose to let students have a voice in the decision. Students were asked to vote on the two logos, and over 80 percent of students voted for one of the logos, he said.
The school will not be transitioning quickly to the new logo. The chosen design will be slowly phased into the school, taking two or three years until the new logo is universally used, Davis said. For example, teams that have functional jerseys with the old logo will not be required to order new ones until they need to. He also explained the more permanent areas with the old logo, like the gym, won’t be redone right away. Instead the new logo be implemented as things need repairs.
“Teams will still have the freedom to design their uniforms however they like, but if you’re going to use a horse, use our Mustang, and if you’re going to use the SM, use our SM,” Davis said.
