Need Help military badges emblems crests

http://www.milbadges.com/corps/USA/navy

 

I went to the actual armed forces websites. Lead of the project I'm putting together is a vet. He's working on getting the official okey-dokey to use the artwork.

 

In my last unit, when I was in the US Army, no one had any idea. Everyone had the same crappy jpeg that got passed around. I had to recreate our brigade insignia to get sent off for challenge coins. Some times wikipedia had some decent PNGs or SVGs when I needed to do it for other units.

 

I do printer installs at military bases all over the US. They all use crappy jpegs!

 

Thought you might like to know the official rules regarding DOD logos

 

I've done some digitizing of the patches for several units (even did the actual patches of ribbons for individual soldiers that wanted those on their jackets), even a few full back designs as well. PDF for the units, but they also had the paperwork to have it done as well. Now, I don't know if there was someone that knew what to do that had converted for me (and did a very good job at that), or that was the file format that they had from the get go.

 

Do you recommend latex or solvent for low rez jpgs extracted from PowerPoint slides who's authors retired at least 15 to 20 years ago?

 

Back when I was a young lad, I had a corel gallery collection of 10+ CD's with clipart and an entire section of vectored military emblems. Someone has actually uploaded it to Twitter! LOL https://twitter.com/clipart1994bot?lang=en I doubt this is the entire collection but this is hilarious! "@Clipart1994bot is a Twitter bot created by Mark Sample that tweets clipart from the classic 1994 Corel Gallery CD-ROM of 10,000 clipart

Proceed at your own risk, but I searched Corel Gallery Clipart, and found internet archives of the disks online. Not to mention the copyright risks, but damn- I wouldn't have thought that would have been available - Damn kids! Get off my lawn!!

 

When I was active duty USAF I was in charge of the "Graphics Department". We worked extensively with our Wing Historian at the time to ensure all our specific unit emblems were of the correct color specifications as per guidelines. We vectorized them all and he then kept a paper copy, as well as, a digital copy in his archive files. I posted links to the eps files on our Intranet for the unit to use. Trouble is the majority doesn't know the difference between raster and vector. Another factor was that our Wing Historian was very much into military history and truly cared about his job. Not so much throughout the services.I've had some luck tracking down either the Public Affairs office or Unit Historian who got me the correct format I was after. They have them, they just don't know what or why they have them. Fast forward some years later and the Air Force got rid of the Graphics field altogether(aka Visual Information) which ultimately lead to demize of most vector art files.

p.s. 90% of the emblems you find out there (png's or jpg's) are not the "authorized" versions. i.e. bevels and gradients and such.

 

Unfortunately there is no one single place where authentic vector-based files of military emblems, crests, etc from the four branches of the military and Coast Guard are all collected. There is no uniform set of standards for any of this stuff. It's basically a scatter-shot mess.

IMHO the military does a frankly p!$$ poor job of managing its branding and graphics assets. It's not difficult to obtain truly professional quality graphics files as well as proper branding guidelines and color specifications from for overall branches of the military -like the US Army logo or the logo for the US Air Force. When you drill down to individual unit crests the standards are usually pretty bad.

Clip art collections of military logos aren't much better. While they might be vector-based the quality of the logos can be pretty poor. Back in the 1990's CorelDRAW 8 had a decent collection of military-theme clip art licensed from One Mile Up. That collection wasn't included in later versions of CorelDRAW.

We do quite a lot of military work, given the close proximity of Fort Sill as well as a few other military installations within an hour's drive. Very often the file type of choice provided by the client is a freaking PowerPoint PPT file containing a low resolution pixel-based image. JPEG images are the next most popular choice, followed by PNG images. If they do bring in a vector-based file it's just as likely to be an ancient file saved in Windows Metafile (WMF) format as it is a more useful EPS file. Very often we end up having to re-create unit crests in vector format.

That doesn't really describe any sort of proper brand use (color specs, white space requirements, etc). It's merely a warning for people not to use Armed Services emblems in unauthorized fashion, like making a clock with a Marine Corps emblem in the background and selling it as a retail item. But those kinds of rules pretty much apply to any brand. Someone can get into just as much trouble making and selling Coca-Cola t-shirts without the Coca-Cola company's involvement. It's trademark infringement.

 

The government only allows certain military units software that can be used for design. That's probably down to 3% now that the Graphics career field is no longer. They do, however, allow everyone Microsoft Office Suite for which no specific training is given. The majority of those don't know the difference between raster and vector. Another thing to consider is that vector clipart does not translate well in a powerpoint presentation. It will look very "choppy" but print really well. Png/jpg are best used in powerpoint. I know CorelDRAW came with a plethora of clipart of military emblems as cmx and wmf. We still have the discs.

 

There is nothing wrong with them having that policy (other than perhaps turning people loose in MS Office if they don't know how to use it). Only a small percentage of the population has any natural understanding of graphics, page layout, etc and an even smaller percentage has any real training to do graphics work. The much larger percentage of the population who merely need "office productivity applications" don't need anything fancy. JPEGs and PNGs of logos are usually good enough for those folks. Although it would be nice if MS Office didn't stink as bad as it does at handling vector-based graphics and images.

With that being said, the military branches should have a department actively managing all the brand assets. That means maintaining a library of high quality vector-based versions of all the logos, crests, badges, rank insignia, etc in each service branch and keeping all of those assets updated with all the latest design changes and asset additions. They should also have color specs and usage guidelines included with each asset. Any little embedded PNG or JPEG logos in some soldier's PPT file would be derived from those managed assets.

This would be a little like what the NFL and Major League Baseball does with all its assets -they have to keep all those logos and other assets updated for the sporting press and companies licensed to create team merchandise.

 

I agree, in part, with you Bobby H. The whole reason the military did away with the career field was their wasn't really a "wartime task" for them. You gonna send a "soldier" to battle or a graphic designer? Should our tax dollars be going to graphic designers or "soldiers". Don't get me wrong I loved the job but didn't make me feel proud to be making business cards, retirement brochures, placemats, etc.If it come down to budget cuts who do you think should be the first to go. Our office was shut down and turned into a "self-help" area. No one had a clue how to use it and it was eventually phased out altogether. We had a large format printer, laminator, large sheet fed scanner, Kodak photo printer, 3 or 4 dual xeon workstations with FireGl graphics cards, ancient engraving machine, various rolls of media, and a high speed color laser printer. Those individuals that were not eligible for retirement such as me were asked to retrain into another career field or get out.

 

Graphics and iconography are a pretty big deal in the military. And the stuff does figure in with war time functions as well as keeping the peace. I learned that growing up in the military on a series of Marine Corps and Navy bases. The stuff is an intregal element of communicating and sustaining military culture. Unit crests are almost synonymous with sports logos in their function to visually identify a bunch of people as part of a team. They get displayed on all sorts of things, from clothing to the tail fins of fighter jets. It's certainly not a waste of taxpayer money.

As to whether a soldier should be wasting time doing military-oriented graphics work one has to ask if just any civilian should turned loose on that kind of job. I'm not asking for every military base or post to have a graphics department. But the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard all need experienced people who understand the culture and history of those armed forces safe guarding their brand work, right down to every unit crest.

It doesn't always work out so well when operational aspects of a military base are jobbed out to civilian contractors. Just look at the absolutely disgraceful scandal involving base housing. They privatized the operation of base housing in the 1990's along with doing other things like posting rent-a-cops at the gates. Anyway the quality of base housing went into the toilet over the past 20+ years.

It's also worth mentioning that many military service people have other duties than strapping on a rifle or hopping into a Paladin Howitzer. My dad's peace time MOS in the Marines was public affairs. But he did lots of combat training and saw action in Vietnam and Beirut. Every base I lived on had its own newspaper. The base in Iwakuni, Japan had its own American TV & radio station. Graphics people were needed in both places.