Size / / /

The completion of the content checking reminds me that I've been meaning to post a reminder about our logo design competition -- entries due by this Sunday 27 November by 23.59 PST. As a reminder, here are the guidelines copied from my editorial. If you have any questions, feel free to post them as comments below.

What is the competition?

Design a new logo for Strange Horizons, and if your entry is selected, win $252.30, plus the first T-shirt printed with the new logo—plus the kudos factor of seeing your work here in the magazine.

What are we looking for?

Strange Horizons is looking for a new logo as part of our upcoming website relaunch. The logo should be reproducible on black and white backgrounds and be suitable for printing on various media (ideally in colour or in black and white). It will also be a central part of the magazine's new look, and may even suggest a theme that could be carried through the rest of the site.

We have some ideas about what we think we're looking for, above and beyond the practical constraints listed above. If you've got a brilliant idea that doesn't quite meet these guidelines, you may still want to go for it, of course.

  • We'd like the new logo to reference or reinvent the old one—so you may want to keep the same sort of colour scheme, or make use of the planet in some way
  • We'd like the logo to work in different sizes: at minimum, a "Strange Horizons" version and an "SH" version; we'd also like it to be printable at 300 dpi
  • We're not particularly interested in a detailed artwork; something simple, suggestive, perhaps abstract may work best
  • We're not particularly interested in the conventional icons of SF and fantasy (rocket ships, dragons, that sort of thing) (for the logo! At other times we love the conventional icons of SF and fantasy). We're more interested in planets and nebulae, oceans and islands
  • We're more about curves than angles, more about organic than synthetic
  • Some words to consider: modern, clean, precise, striking, light, and of course, strange

How to submit an entry

Email your entry to logo@strangehorizons.com by 23.59 PST Sunday 27 November. Please provide your entry as a scalable vector graphic (no raster files). Any fonts used should be converted to curve paths prior to submission (no font embedding), and font files for any fonts used should be provided with the submission (i.e. fonts used should be available under a license that allows their free distribution).

How will the winner be selected?

The winning logo will be selected by the Strange Horizons editors. In the event of an impasse, the final decision will be made by me (Niall Harrison).

Who can enter?

Everyone is eligible except the relatives of Strange Horizons staff.

What else?

By submitting you confirm that works submitted are your original creations. If your entry is selected as the new logo, we may ask you to make minor adjustments, and we will ask you to provide the relevant design files to enable us to adapt the logo for a range of uses. The winning entry becomes the property and copyright of Strange Horizons Inc, but designers retain all rights to logos that are not selected (and the original designer will be credited on the site). If no winner is selected, no prize will be paid.



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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