#nba logos

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Game 3 tonight! Thunder vs Golden State. Playoffs!

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New Post has been published on http://staynba.com/take-a-look-at-the-improved-new-logo-of-the-utah-jazz/

Take A Look At The Improved New Logo Of The Utah Jazz

As of today, these are all of the current logos being used by the Utah Jazz.

As of tomorrow, according to a report from Paul Lukas, we can expect that to change.

The circular secondary logo style is being used by plenty of teams around the league now, and there’s a segment of Broolyn Nets fans who are annoyed by this because they view their team as being the one that started the trend, but for the sake of this post most would agree that the new Jazz logo is a lot better this way.

Continue to the logo on the next page

EXCLUSIVE: T-shirts show new Utah Jazz logos. My understanding is that the official unveiling will be tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/ex1jFk8vR3

— Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) May 11, 2016

Via FoxSports

#NBA #basketball #news

[hype-fresh]

Ever thought some of the NBA logos were a bit out-dated and needed to be revamped? Well, graphic designer Addison Foote thought so too and decided to redesign them himself. Starting with the Utah Jazz, Foote edited all 30 NBA logos in 30 days.

“My knowledge of the NBA is pretty well-versed, but I still wanted to kind of do a little bit of research behind the history of every team’s logo and behind the meaning of the team name and references of their cities,” Foote said. “I tried to kind of compile as much information and knowledge (as I could) before I started my concept sketches.”

He posted all of the redefined logos on Reddit and got the NBA’s attention within four days. The league offered Foote a contract to do some freelance work for social media pages.

“I was shocked with how well it was received,” he said. “I didn’t have any expectations with it. I just wanted to do it just as a personal project just for fun.”

“I was so excited. I’d always dreamed as a kid to do something for the NBA. I’ve always been a huge basketball fan,” Foote continued.

You can check out some of the 30 graphics below and view the rest here.

Graphic Designer Offered Job With NBA After Redesigning Team Logos Ever thought some of the NBA logos were a bit out-dated and needed to be revamped? Well, graphic designer…

[furryalligator]

If you look at one GIF today, make it this one. A Redditor created a GIF showcasing the evolution of all NBA logos. pic.twitter.com/EvbzXAWLgZ

— 120 Sports (@120Sports) July 10, 2015

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DesignPants: NBA Logo Rankings

Good afternoon everyone. This is it. We’ve finally made our way to the first official article of DesignPants. I thought I would start with something near and dear to my heart and just tear it to shreds. I have tried my best (and mostly succeeded) to be unbiased and not to let my opinion of the team sway my opinion of the logo. I have also thrown tradition out the window; any classic team that makes it on either side of the list does so based entirely on its design merit. 

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.

—Jesse is on twitter and Instagram, and sometimes he puts stuff on Behance

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New NBA Sports Logos to Review in Milwaukee and Washington DC

Over the past week, a couple of NBA teams decided to change their look. First, it was the Milwaukee Bucks. They said “Buh-bye” to this logo…

Logos courtesy of sportslogos.net

And hello to this…

No more red – probably to avoid all Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer association – and now he has 12 points instead of 8. All the more to . . . gore the opposition with. And if you look really carefully, you can see that the Buck’s neck is actually an M. Very creative.

Before we get into their rationale for the color switch, we need to point out the obvious. Their logo looks an AWFUL lot like the Jägermeister logo:

Here’s the real reason that the Bucks dumped red in favor of “cream” as a secondary color: the “Cream City Brick”. The clay near Milwaukee becomes creamy-yellow in color when it is formed into a brick. Those bricks played a major role in Milwaukee’s development in the late 1800’s, so much so that Milwaukee earned the nickname “The Cream City”.

According to their website, the Bucks also plan to use blue as a third color – partly to underline the importance of the Great Lakes, and partly to honor the Milwaukee Hawks (who used blue as a primary color), the first NBA team to play in Milwaukee. That said, none of the logos they have trotted out thus far have any blue.

The Bucks were not alone in changing their look. The Washington Wizards also made a change of their own.

Old Wizards logo

New Wizards logo

Both the Bucks and Wizards made it to the NBA playoffs. But where the Bucks are planning to make the shift next season, the Wizards are making that change NOW.

I’ve never been a fan of the Wizards logo or nickname, even when they brought back the primary red and blue colors from their prior nickname: the Bullets (which they were known as from 1963 – at that point while in Baltimore – through 1997). And this logo switch seems to open the door for another nickname change. Why, you ask?

For one, what happened to the Wizard? And two, the primary focus is the Washington Monument (along with 3 stars that according to the Wizards represent Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia). Could “Monuments” be the next name for Washington’s basketball franchise? We’ll have to wait and see.

With the NBA playoffs in progress, why not adopt your own hoops team? Especially ones with a localized meaning behind their look, like the Bucks and Wizards.

You could rock the voodoo flavor of New Orleans and get comfy as part of the New Orleans Curse:

Or you could rock something unique from our Panamanian Basketball League collection. My favorite is the Caimanes de Rio Abajo.

We hope you enjoy!

Thanks as always for reading,

Paul Gallant

Awesome Sports Logos