If any of you are celebrating your own ‘Games’ this summer of 2012 and you, like us, are afraid of infringing copyright laws, you will be pleased to know that I have discovered a large set of sporting iconography, along with a generic ‘Games’ logo that is in the public domain (CC0 license) and is therefore available to use freely as you wish. If your own event is small, large, or even of Olympic proportions, and whether it is being held in Edinburgh, Cardiff, London, Belfast or any other location in Britain, you are legally able to use these symbols incorporated in your artwork. This has to be good news!

Games Logo

I was in the throes of producing a set of sporting icons to put in the public domain on openclipart.org when I came across this wonderful set on Wikimedia Commons. In the interests of not re-inventing the wheel, I decided that the company should adopt these icons as a standard and, therefore, would encourage our customers to use them for their own events too.

As you are aware, this company supports Creative Commons licensing and even uses the ‘Public Domain’ CC0 license itself, so I was really happy to discover that there are others out there that are willing to share their work and place it in the public domain for all to use!

The icons, in my opinion, are sublime, and I feel that we should all thank Parutakupiu (this links to the original SVG files) for the effort and time spent producing these creations. I do hope that you agree with me, and that you will all embrace this work in your sporting designs this year rather than try to get away with ‘Pirate copies’ of official logos of any other sporting event that may be encountered. I reiterate that these logos are 100% free to use in whatever way you wish!

Using these pieces of clip art, you can combine them with suitable fonts which are also CC licensed, (such as the Ubuntu font that I have used), to make your own ‘Games’ artwork which can safely go onto garments or gifts with no fear of copyright infringement.

2012 Don Games - Logo produced for a fantasy event at the AECC in the Bridge of Don.

By way of example, I thought that it would be good if we were to have a major sporting event here in Aberdeen, perhaps at the AECC in the Bridge of Don. I therefore produced a suitable logo for the ’2012 Don games’ as seen right. I have produced this using both Public Domain and Creative Commons components.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Combining this type of logo with a suitable selection from the Sporting Pictograms will allow you to join in the 2012 sporting festivities in Creative Commons style!!