25 Highlights in 25 Weeks: Highlight #6 – Pelican Lakes Logo Timeline

Pelican Lakes Resort & Golf turns 25 on July 12, 2024! To celebrate, we are listing the top 25 moments in Pelican Lakes’ history. These events are not ranked and highlight the biggest events, features, and happenings at the distinguished 27-hole facility in Northern Colorado.

Blog 6 out of 25: Pelican Lakes Logo Timeline

If you’re a business, a logo means everything.

It symbolizes the feel, services, identity, and overall vibe of the products you offer.

Pelican Lakes Resort & Golf in Windsor, CO has gone through several logos during its nearly 25-year history.

Let’s dive into the images that have branded the 27-hole golf paradise in Northern Colorado. All three logos used to represent Pelican Lakes were designed to salute either a geographic feature or a landmark on the course. And, naturally, all three logos depict the majestic American White Pelican that is the course’s mascot.  

When Pelican Lakes opened on July 12, 1999, the logo presented on new golf shirts and scorecards featured a thin green line drawing of a pelican silhouette with a prominent beak and a red flag waving on a flagstick incorporated on its spine.

The logo was simple and minimalistic, yet subtly symbolized water, a green and a flagstick.

This bird logo assisted in ushering in a new era of golf in Northern Colorado. In 1999, Pelican Lakes was among 10 new golf courses in the state, and one of two new tracks in Northern Colorado. Coyote Creek in Fort Lupton was the other.

Upon opening, Pelican Lakes announced our impressive 7.5 miles of shoreline lining the course, which is the most in North America. As a way of saluting that moniker, subtle ripples of water were incorporated into the original logo.

The logo witnessed many firsts at Pelican Lakes, including country music icons Tim McGraw & Faith Hill playing the course, the destructive Windsor tornado in 2008, thousands of golf rounds and various other non-golf events like the Roar of the Rockies boat races.

The logo was phased out at the end of 2013 for a new, cartoon character representation of an iconic bronze statue that resides outside the clubhouse atop a water feature near the practice putting green. The logo portrays a proud pelican reared up on its webbed feet standing on a gray rock as its wings are stretched out to the side.

The “Proud Pelly” changed the course’s logo color from green and red to yellow and white. The head of the logo was used by the Pelican Lakes marketing team in various ways, including wearing a Santa hat during the holidays, or inside circular text during the course’s 20^th anniversary year in 2019.

After seven years, the logo needed an upgrade. The current logo, designed by the Denver-based real estate marketing firm Art & Business One, is an homage to the geography of the golf course.

And this version happened by mistake.

Jill Hinkle, the wife of the Director of Golf Kurt Hinkle, inadvertently takes credit for the logo design. During a sunny March day in 2021, Jill tracked her son’s whereabouts through the mobile app, Life360. What she saw was her son Carter’s dotted line journey while playing Pelican Lakes. The course was cart path only on that day, and the app illustrated his phone’s trip around the course. Jill’s text to her husband read, “Doesn’t this look like a pelican?”

Sure enough, the crude GPS tracking lines did sort of outline a pelican soaring in the sky.

This screenshot was sent to Cindy Milnick at Art & Business One, and after a few variations, she created the design of the current logo. As mentioned before, this logo represents a pelican aloft in the sky with four new colors – burnt orange, a mustard-type yellow, gray, and black. When overlayed on top of a satellite image of the 18-hole Pelican Lakes course, the logo covers virtually all the turf on the course.

“It’s almost like we designed the course based on this logo,” Kurt Hinkle jokingly said. “Now when I look at Google Maps of Pelican Lakes, I instantly see the logo.”

Art & Business One also produced a video unveiling the logo and it can be found by clicking here.

After over two decades, the course finally has a logo that was literally built into the DNA of the property.