#designpants

I have spent hours in thought, sought trustworthy council, and prayed fervently (just kidding on the last one). My criteria for these rankings takes into account the main logos and the secondary logos of the team, but does not include jersey design. And so without too much rambling, because there will be tons of it as we go, here are my Top 5 and my Bottom 5 NBA logos:

Bottom 5: The Bad and the Awful

#5 - Los Angeles Clippers (brand new logo)

I’m torn on this logo, because I really like the LAC monogram, I think it’s exciting and unique and ugly-cool and it will look great on the t-shirt of that drunk guy who is spilling beer on your shoes the next time LA comes to town. Unfortunately, it seems like they whipped up the rest of the logo in the 5 minutes before their presentation started. They get a small amount of credit for avoiding the cliche spikey sports lettering for “Clippers”, but lose it immediately because the letters they chose suck. Also the NBA Live logo comparisons are totally applicable.

#4 - Miami Heat

Ok, I know I said I wasn’t going to let my opinions of the team sway my opinions of the logos, but I straight-up lied to you. This is a bad logo for a bad team and seeing it on the fronts of thousands of LeBron James jerseys and t-shirts has made it even worse. First of all, the thickness of the lines on the flames are completely arbitrary, and don’t even get me started on the random yellow flames sticking out of the top. Someone screwed up with the Paint Bucket Tool in 1999 and no one has ever corrected it. Finally the word mark is stupid and that stupid “T” needs to go back where it came from.

#3 - Golden State Warriors

Maybe I can win back your trust with this ranking, because I am an admitted Warriors bandwagoner. This is a team that I like with a really bad logo. First of all, Copperplate Gothic? Really? Were they only allowed to use the fonts that came preloaded on their Toshiba? Second, look at how the blue circle doesn’t align correctly with the yellow circle. LOOK AT IT. My only explanation is that they were going for a 3D effect where it looks like Warriors is closer to you than Golden State, but it REALLY doesn’t work. The bridge is alright, and if you only see it from really far away, maybe this would be a decent logo.

#2 - Oklahoma City Thunder

I had a hard time keeping this logo off of the #1 spot. There are so many problems I don’t know where to start. The only positive thing I can say is that the wordmark isn’t the worst. Beyond that we’ve got the guitar pick shape, the bad perspective effects, the arbitrary swooshes, and the awful colors. They have no excuse in this case. There isn’t some logo from the 1890s that they have to reference, there isn’t years of fan equity built up, they had the chance to make something completely from scratch and they really blew it. 

#1 - Washington Wizards

This is a bad logo disguising itself as a decent logo and that is why it is the worst of them all. At a glance, the basketball is cool, it has the washington monument and a star, it’s red, white, and blue, and it’s in a circle. Everybody likes that! This logo falls apart in the details though, and when it does, it REALLY falls apart. The lines in the ball don’t make any sense and the star is just forced in there, the line weight is all over the place and random, and the dimension on the monument doesn’t apply anywhere else in the logo. The lettering gets worse and worse the more you look at it. The spacing is bad and the details are terrible. Look at the “I”, look at the bottom right of the “N”, and if you don’t want to go insane NEVER LOOK AT THE “G” EVER IN YOUR LIFE. If that wasn’t enough, someone was kind enough to grab the below detail shot from the Wizards media guide. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s the sign of not only a bad logo, but a logo that didn’t really even try.

Top 5: The Good and the Great

#5 - Milwaukee Bucks

We start our top 5 list with the incredibly fun logo of the Milwaukee Bucks. That buck drawing is awesome with the hidden basketball in the antlers, the almost subtle M in the neck, and the beautifully minimal face. The lettering is a little wonky, but I think it’s in a good way. There also appears to be some thought put into how the letters looked laid out in a semi-circle. I’ve heard some people say they don’t like the colors, but I think they are fantastic. The Bucks would go higher on my list, but their secondary logos are really terrible. The basketball alternate is as poorly drawn as the buck is well-drawn. I don’t have too much to say, it’s just terrible. Similarly the Wisconsin with BUCKS in it seems to be hastily thrown together in the worst way.

#4 - New Orleans Pelicans

I tried my best to avoid picking all newer logos for this list, because it’s really easy to pick the designs that fit most within the current design trends. This is definitely a trendy logo, but I also think it happens to be a pretty good one. Granted, in 10 or 15 years the lettering may seem a little dated, but the drawing of the pelican, the use of color, and the layout of the information will always be effective. The use of space is my favorite part of the logo with a fleur-de-lis, a pelican, the wordmark, a basketball, and the team name all sharing the logo beautifully. The hierarchy is great as well, leading us down from New Orleans to the pelican drawing, whose beak draws our eyes to Pelicans, which is curved to bring us back up into the composition. The only complaint I have with the logo is that it will start to get very cluttered at any sort of smaller size, but their alternate logos are pretty good and that pelican looks like it might rip my eyes out if it hears me talking bad about it. 

#3 - Memphis Grizzlies

We open our top three with the Memphis Grizzlies. Their color palette is a little childish, but they make up for it with that bear. The wordmark is alright, I’m not sure about the inline look, and the spikes on the top lefts are at least consistent. The illustration has a couple hiccups in the details (what’s up with that mouth?), but the overall look is great and the attitude is awesome. This attitude moves deftly into the fantastic alternate logo, with a beautifully drawn claw gripping the ball. The claws blending into the seams of the ball is a nice touch.

#2 - Minnesota Timberwolves

I got some backlash for putting the T-Wolves logo this high in my list, but I DONT CARE. This logo is a blast, with the snarling wolf coming over the treeline and the quirky wordmark. The composition has hints of a Goosebumps book cover, and I like to think the designers weren’t taking themselves too seriously. This wordmark of course is an updated version introduced 5 years ago, and is a great refinement of the old version which was INSANE. The “Minnesota” type is nice and the colors are great. There’s not much negative to say about this logo unless you are a sourpuss who hates fun lettering and wishes there were more layups in today’s game. Also the alternate logo is pretty sweet.

#1 - Atlanta Hawks

Alright here it is, the number 1 top logo in the NBA in this humble reporter’s opinion is the Atlanta Hawks. This is a very good logo. The hawk’s head is a derivative of the great “pacman” logo that was used from 1972—1995. I’m still partial to the simplified classic logo, but this is a good update, adding some modern fierceness to the hawk. It took me a while to come around to the wordmark, and I still don’t love how some of it works in the circle, but overall I’m a big fan. The alternate logo, which will be used in many applications, ditches the wordmark and amplifies the logo’s great restraint and minimalism which is absolutely rare in sports branding. I still don’t know if I can come around on their crazy neon green secondary color and jerseys, but this is a logo blog post, so get off my back!!

Honorable Mention

76ers Secondary Ben Franklin Logo

This is a majestic design. A lot of times we get caught up being so serious about sports, this is a fantastic example of having fun with sports and sports design. More insanity in sports logos please. 

Wrapping Up

That’s all for this week’s DesignPants, I’ll try to find some time soon for some more sports logo rankings, and I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground and exhausting all of my sources for the latest breaking sports design news. 

Massive thanks to sportslogos.net for the fantastic resource. If you have any sports or design related topics you are dying for DesignPants to weigh in on, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Now what makes me qualified to talk about sports design? Very little! I do possess a Graphic Design degree (Visual Communication if you’re fancy) from the University of Texas at Arlington, I work as a Creative Director at a DFW printshop, and I also really like sports. If that doesn’t convince you, I currently have exactly one logo in public circulation, which you can find at the top of this website.

About Sports Design

So as an intro to DesignPants, let’s talk generally about sports design. In short, it blows. Sports are great, but they combine a lot of the very worst factors for good design work.

First, they are run by powerful, rich people or groups of people who have very strong, very terrible opinions and their entire livelihoods at stake. If you’ve got this great new Dallas Cowboys secondary logo, and then jersey sales drop by 1%, Jerry Jones will personally end your life. Second, sports franchises are massive, billion dollar corporations with crazy corporate infrastructures. Any significant design decision is run across desk after desk until someone inevitably says “but what if we added like a cool chrome effect to the whole thing, and can we just make the whole thing pop more?”. Finally, fans ruin every good design that can make its way through this insane process. Last year FSU released an updated Seminole head logo which was CLEARLY an improvement from ol’ bacon-face. There was immediate backlash from FSU fans everywhere. Commenters on the Facebook post announcing the change called the new logo “blasphemous”, “horrible”, and “distasteful”, rated it “the worst logo redesign ever!!!”, and wondered why “you don't care about your alumni or fans let alone boosters”. Several other colleges have relented and changed their logos back after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a rebrand. People care much more about a slight change in the secondary logo of a college they never went to than they do about social change or dying puppies.

This is the perfect petri dish for uninspired, generic, and overall sucky design. It’s always sad to see a quality design firm release a boring sports logo and imagine what could have been without all of the bureaucracy. It is also why many of the greatest designs in sports are created for minor league teams. When you take away the pressure of money and rabid fans, good designers can let their designs shine. There are certainly exceptions, which I will touch on in later blog posts, but my general outlook on sports design at the moment is trying my best to find the small bits of diamond amongst the manure.

Next Time on DesignPants

Well that’s all I’ve got so far. I’m just about done with the labor of love that is my first real article: a courageous and definitive ranking of NBA which should be dropping in the next few days.