Enough with the trees and numbers. There are tens of thousands of golf courses in the world. Most have logos, and many of those logos feature trees and numbers.

Oaks are wildly popular. Conifers, too. Use them on their own, or combine them with the date when the club was founded, and you’ve got yourself a logo.

But is it a good logo? Generic is more likely.

That’s just one man’s opinion, and I shared it recently in a conversation with Simon Holt, my co-host on Destination Golf, GOLF’s new weekly travel-focused podcast. I think Simon agreed.

Not that we were dwelling on the negative. Our aim was to accentuate the positive by naming our favorite club logos and explaining why we like them. 

One rule we settled on is that a golf logo shouldn’t be obviously golf-y. You want it to be something you can wear off the course among non-golfers without coming across as a dork. Eye-catching? Sure. That’s essential. But subtlety counts, too. Quirky works up to a point, provided it’s not forced. Things go sideways quickly when a logo tries too hard.

In Simon’s view, courses in the U.S. do a better job with logos than their counterparts in the U.K, where, he says, many logos are so large, “you can see them from the moon.” That’s another rule. Understatement makes a good fashion statement.

But those are sweeping guidelines. How about examples?

Among my favorite logos is the wild onion of Ohoopee Match Club. A sleekly drawn, idiosyncratic image that draws its distinctive character from its surrounds (the club itself sits in Vidalia onion-growing country) it meets the criteria spelled out above. I also dig the logo at Pasatiempo — a dude in a sombrero, taking a snooze — as it captures the laidback vibe of Santa Cruz, Calif. The image is subliminally counter-intuitive, too, as Pasatiempo is not a course you want to sleep on. A good logo has the power to make you think.

Maidstone’s spouting whale is another of my faves. Yeah, it’s got a number, the date the club was founded. But — did I mention? — it’s got a spouting whale! And then there’s Sleepy Hollow Golf Club, with its headless horseman. That logo, inspired by local legend, lodges in your memory, and you’ve gotta love it: Ichabod Crane on the brain.

Simon came up with a list of his own. Fishers Island was on it. So was Winged Foot and — come to think of it, better that you hear it straight from him. You can listen to our entire logo conversation here, and tune in to other episodes of Destination Golf wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’ve got a question or a comment for us about golf and travel, you can email us at destinationgolfpodcast@gmail.com.