Clearly this would have been more timely news about ten days ago when the announcement was first made on the Thursday before Super Bowl XLIV but, technically, we are ahead of the game by about 355 days. Just as we were all — mostly — getting excited about Attik’s work the NFL unveiled not only a new logo for Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas but a whole strategy for an undisclosed number of Super Bowls to come, designed by Landor.
There is no Sunday like Super Bowl Sunday: The friends, the beer, the chips, the bets, the ads… and, oh yeah, the game. And just in case you were confused by this year’s Pro Bowl being played before the Super Bowl, heed the news, the Super Bowl is this Sunday in Miami, Florida with the New Orleans Saints playing the Indianapolis Colts. But aside from mentioning the obvious, let us turn our attention to the Super Logo, designed this season by Attik.
Perhaps I have said this far too many times but, man, you don’t want to redesign university identities. And perhaps an even more thankless job, or a more dangerous one, is redesigning a university’s athletic identity. Last month, the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University filed for a trademark application for the redesigned icon of the Spartans, the athletic teams of Michigan State University. Last week, the blog Gang Green Red Cedar Message Board at SpartanTailgate.com uncovered the registration and exposed the perhaps imminent change. Students got pissed.
The NHL Draft, once monopolized by Montréal, Quebec (the consistent home from 1963 to 1984 and for several other years including last year’s), now finds itself in a slightly warmer location on southern California’s coast for the 2010 edition. Looking back over recent years, the draft logo was largely dominated by Canada’s red color heritage and a notable lack of consideration for the requisite NHL shield logo integration. This year’s logo is as much a departure from the norm as the geographic location is.
The Union of European Football Associations has been around since 1954. It is comprised of 53 European associations and is headquartered in Nyon, Switzerland. Almost always referred to by its acronym UEFA, it organizes several national and club-level competitions across Europe. The largest of six continental confederations of the French Swiss organization FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association), UEFA is also the wealthiest and most influential over the game of football. Since 1960, UEFA has held one of their Pan European competitions, the UEFA European Football Championship, every four years in member countries. In 2000, for the first time, the tournament was held by two neighboring countries, Netherlands and Belgium. The trend stayed and the last competition in 2008 was in Austria and Switzerland. In 2012, the games will be held by neighbors Poland and Ukraine. A first for Central and Eastern Europe.
Three years after it was selected as the host city of the XXII Olympic Winter Games and five years before it becomes the center of global attention, the city of Sochi, Russia unveiled the identity for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, created by the Moscow office of Interbrand — who, I’m told, in the Olympic spirit brought in five designers from Interbrand offices around the world to work on the identity.
Before the first race of the famous Daytona 500 at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1959 took place, a new organization, International Speedway Corporation (ISC), was formed by NASCAR founder Bill France, Sr. in 1953 to oversee the construction of the racing complex and manage it. Since then, along with the explosion in popularity of professional car racing, ISC has become one of the most intrinsic organizations of this sport, owning thirteen major motorsports arenas in the U.S. This week they introduced a new logo that replaces a 12-year-old, going-on-fifty logo.
In February of 2008, the Major League Soccer awarded the city of Philadelphia an expansion slot to become its 16th team and start play in the 2010 season. Operating since then under the snoozy name of MLS Philadelphia 2010, the team finally unveiled its new name and identity yesterday in front of Philadelphia’s historic City Hall: Philadelphia Union.
Last season’s ridiculous record of zero wins against sixteen losses for the NFL’s Detroit Lions makes its glory days of four NFL championships, the latest more than fifty years ago in 1957, a very distant past. Truth be told, the woes of its football team should be the least of the city of Detroit’s worries, but few things can bring the citizens together as an exciting sports franchise and the Lions are doing whatever they can to bring a little bit of hope to Detroit, and a new identity for the Lions may not be the salvation but at least it’s a diversion. Yesterday’s media announcement of the new logo would have been more climactic had the logo not been leaked by the NFL itself nearly a month ago when the store posted a toy 18-wheeler featuring the new logo.
Hosted by the Asian Football Confederation, Asia’s governing body of soccer, the annual AFC Champions League features the best clubs from each country competing for Asian soccer supremacy. This past December they unveiled a new identity aimed towards the new and growing generation of soccer enthusiasts.