Sorry it took me so long to get my designs ironed out and entered! I think there is still plenty of time to work back and forth, as needed though. Here are my initial concepts. Let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!
As far as spacing goes, #11 & #12 work a bit better than the other two. But there is something nice about having the handle included that really drives home the visual of looking at a tailgate.
Like the tailgate with the handle. Is there a way to limit the number of colors. One of our uses will be embroidery and we are concerned that the number of colors will be difficult.
Here are a couple simpler options for embroidery (#18 & #19). It still looks like the web/2.0 version, but is obviously simpler for embroidery. I digitize and setup for stitching quite a bit, so this is about as detailed as you want to get.
Here is an alternate wordmark option, without the tailgate. The tailgate works great, but sometimes a logo that is too horizontal like this could cause some difficulty in fitting into narrower spaces. So, I thought it might be good to have one close to the horizontal/vertical middle ground.
Great. Let me know if you think of anymore changes you may want to see. I will see if any other ideas strike me tonight. Also, if anything comes to mind after you hit Judging Mode, your top-ranked designer can still submit changes. Have a good night!