Brand Logos in BikeCAD

Whether you're a builder designing a bike you intend to build, a shop modeling a bike that will be just right for your customer, or a cyclist just wanting to mock-up your dream machine, BikeCAD is the perfect tool for documenting the geometry of your frame and components. But once you've established the geometry, its also nice to experiment with cosmetic features. In BikeCAD, you can easily change colours and try different paint schemes. You can also modify things like the down tube logo.

In BikeCAD you can access any font installed on your operating system. There are a number of bike brands that use standard fonts or have logos that can be closely approximated using standard fonts. The BikeCAD.ca website has a listing of some of these brands. Using this reference, you could for example, note that the Don Walker down tube logo could be modeled with the Seven Swordsman font. If you download and install that font, you'll find it in the down tube decal menu. Meanwhile, there are a number of brands whose logos cannot be represented through standard fonts.

In BikeCAD version 10, you'll find a collection of dingbat type fonts containing a comprehensive collection of bicycle brands. If you click on the question mark icon next to the font, you'll be taken to a webpage listing all the logos and the characters associated with each brand logo. As you can see, the Alchemy logo can be obtained using the minus sign in the font called CyclingBrands2. From Appleman to Zanconato and Zinn, you'll find a tonne of your favourite builders here. In some cases, as with the PVD dingbat, the character is inherently outlined. In this case, you would not want to add an additional outline. In other cases, as with the Geekhouse dingbat, the character is not outlined, but you have the option to add an outline by checking the box in the decal dialog box.

In some cases, you may want to place two dingbats on top of each other. For example, you could use down tube decal 1 to display the lowercase i character from CyclingBrands2 which is the Independent Fabrication logo. On top of that, using the same dimensional specifications in down tube decal 2 you could display the capital I from CyclingBrands2 which is a variation on the Independent Fabrication logo. By showing one logo in black and the other in a different colour you can effectively display a single two toned logo.

The generosity of builders who have contributed their logos to this collection is greatly appreciated. Being able to accurately document bicycle designs in terms of geometry and aesthetics is one of the key goals of BikeCAD. However, since BikeCAD is so easy to use and is freely available to anyone, it is important to understand that the builders and companies who own these logos do not necessarily endorse any BikeCAD model that happens to contain their brand name.