About · Our identity

The TAASA logo

Our emblem gathers the tools of the archer and the symbols of the nation into a single mark, its colours taken from the South African flag, its details rooted in the country’s heritage.

Every part of the emblem is deliberate. The palette is borrowed from the national flag, the crossed arrows and traditional bow speak to the discipline itself, and the sprigs framing them are yellowwood, South Africa’s national tree.

Anatomy

The elements of the mark

Watch the emblem assemble, then explore it part by part. Select any element to see where it sits and what it stands for.

Usage

Using the mark

The emblem comes in three forms — the full-colour badge, the single-colour stencil, and the stencil mark on its own. Choose a background to see how each form holds up on the TAASA colours.

Background colour

  • The TAASA emblem in full colour

    Primary, full colour

    The full-colour emblem.

  • Full stencil

    The single-colour badge with the encircling name.

  • Stencil, no wording

    The inner mark alone.

Colours

A palette from the national flag

The emblem is coloured from the South African flag, the same green, gold, black, white and red that fly over the country.

The national flag of South Africa

Six colours make up the flag, and the emblem draws on five of them.

The flag was the first national flag in the world to carry six colours in its main design. Three of them, black, green and gold, come from the flag of the African National Congress; the other three, red, white and blue, are inherited from the Dutch, British and Boer flags of South Africa’s colonial past.

TAASA’s emblem takes its lead from this palette, using the flag’s green, gold, black, white and red so the mark reads unmistakably as South African.

The flag was designed by Frederick Brownell and first raised on 27 April 1994. Officially, no single meaning is attached to the colours; the Y-shape signifies the convergence of a diverse society into unity.

Green, gold and black are the primary colours, with white as their inverse and red used sparingly. The flag’s sixth colour, national flag blue, sits outside the emblem itself but is now used as an alternate colour across TAASA’s wider digital platforms.

The national tree

Framed by the yellowwood

The sprigs above and below the emblem are yellowwood, Podocarpus latifolius, the real yellowwood, declared the national tree of South Africa.

As traditional archers we shoot natural-shaft arrows of wood and bamboo, so wood itself sits at the heart of the craft. A tree speaks to that far more truly than the protea most South African bodies adopt, which is why the yellowwood became our element of choice.

Real yellowwood, Podocarpus latifolius: foliage, fruit and mature form.

Further reading