The Miami Marlins new logo: Brought to you by the letter M

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Paul Caputo

I heard about it for the first time on September 20 of this year: The Florida Marlins, teal and black since their inception in 1993, were getting a new logo, and they were changing their name to the Miami Marlins. This, of course, has been preordained since the 1988 movie Back to the Future II, in which Marty visits the future and witnesses a holographic recap of the Chicago Cubs defeating a Miami baseball team in the 2015 World Series.

When I first heard about the new logo back in September, it was just a rumor reported on CBS Sports. It was not until it was revealed in a dramatic unveiling ceremony on 11/11/11, that this was confirmed as the new Marlins look:

As soon as the leaked logo hit the Internet, the blogosphere lit up with opinions. (The old-school slab serif type on top has nothing to do with the newfangled sans serif M below. You don’t need six colors in a logo. Actual marlins are not that color. What is that thing? Ahhhh my eyes! Etc.) But it was best summed up by Friend of IBD Steve Dimse, who said this in an email: “There are a lot of nice things to be said about the people of Miami, but good taste has never been one of them.”

Some people thought it was a rip-off of the logo for Dolphin Stadium in Miami:

Shea immediately thought of the Maroon 5 album (featuring Christina Aguillera!) “Moves Like Jagger”:

And it reminded me of Miami Vice. But to be fair, what doesn’t remind me of Miami Vice?

I don’t want to be one of those people who automatically dislikes something new just because I’m not used to it yet. To be honest, I’m glad to see the Marlins distance themselves from their original identity, because it signifies another step away from the teal sports logo invasion of the 1990s (see the Carolina Panthers, Arizona Diamondbacks, New Orleans Hornets, Orlando Magic, and San Jose Sharks, among others). That said, this hat, which I found on the Miami Marlins team store, is atrocious:

The unveiling of this new logo coincides with the Marlins moving into a fancy new ballpark. And of course, no new stadium and team identity would be complete without a monstrous, flashing, kinetic, neon, fish-themed structure beyond your centerfield wall to illuminate when the home team hits a home run. An article called “The New Miami Marlins Logo Is No Longer The Worst Thing Ever” on the website SB Nation revealed this actual, not-fake artist’s rendering of said structure:

Many people have tried to describe this, and I will take my swing: This is what you’d get if the people who orchestrated the Pink Floyd laser show tried to design a miniature golf course, then gave up and sold it to be used as the marquee of a 4:00 special seafood buffet. Again, our friend Steve Dimse summed it up: “You have to be impressed by a city that takes a sublime movement like Art Deco as a meme and then pukes up gunk like that.”

Personally, I can’t wait to see new Marlin shortstop Jose Reyes (I assume) don his bright orange Marlins hunting cap and his Crockett and Tubbs-style sleeveless uniform (also something I’m assuming), and light up that centerfield laser show with his first swing in the new stadium. I wonder if you can put cleats in white penny loafers.

Opening day is 138 days away.

Long-Time Listener, First-Time Logo Designer

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Paul Caputo

I think of myself as that rare species: a jocknerd. At any given moment, my iPhone has about 20 podcasts on it, roughly evenly divided between National Public Radio and sports talk shows. (How’s this for nerdy? I know that my round-trip bicycle commute to work is almost exactly the same amount of time as one episode of the NPR news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”)

You may have heard of one of the sports shows I used to listen to, “Into the Night with Tony Bruno.” The host was in the news not long ago for making an inexcusable, racist remark on Twitter about a Hispanic baseball player. (He stupidly called San Francisco Giants pitcher Ramon Ramirez an “illegal alien.”) The show followed a familiar arc after this sort of controversy: Tony apologized, was suspended for a week, came back for a little while, and then just this past Friday, the show aired its final episode.

I was disappointed that Tony Bruno made that boneheaded comment, not only because it was indeed a boneheaded comment, but I liked his show. Also he is a Philly guy and he openly roots for Philly teams, unlike “Wait, Wait” host Peter Sagal, a confirmed Red Sox fan.

Tony and his show’s executive producer Robin Austin (known to fans as Miss Robin) were quite good at interacting with fans—on air, on Facebook, or in person during occasional broadcasts from sites like restaurants, bars, casinos, or whatever. (The photo here is of Robin and Tony at the 2010 Harold Pump Foundation Gala, honoring Muhammad Ali, Denzel Washington, and Hank Aaron.)

Here’s where my weird connection to the show—and Tony Bruno’s connection to Interpretation By Design—begin.

Before the whole “illegal alien” controversy, I had emailed Miss Robin links to IBD posts (once to an article about Mr. Peanut and again to the now-infamous baseball flowchart), and she was kind enough to post them to her show’s Facebook page.

Then, one day, Miss Robin emailed me out of the blue with this question: “You do graphic design, right?” I was surprised when Miss Robin asked if I’d like to help them come up with a new logo for their show. They were changing from “Into the Night with Tony Bruno” to “The Tony Bruno Show” and wanted a new identity.

Robin emailed some thoughts about the logo (“Tony likes blue”) and I jumped at the opportunity to design something. To start the ball rolling, I sent the sketches above. I chose a bold, slab-serif typeface, because when I listened to Tony on the radio, that’s the sort of typeface I pictured his words in. (That’s normal, right? Doesn’t everyone do that? When Shea talks, I hear Curlz MT.) The little microphone image in the sketch on the left is not original; it’s an image I found online and used as a placeholder.

Miss Robin wrote back that they liked the direction I was going, but they did not like the typeface or the microphone. (“We like the direction you’re going” is client code for “Why did you send this to us?”)

Miss Robin sent some examples of fonts that they liked from the site www.1001freefonts.com, so I mocked up some new ideas and sent the above. According to Miss Robin, however, Tony worried that the O of Bruno was not reading as an O (“The Tony Brun Show”), so again I got the the professional equivalent of It’s not you, it’s me—”We like the direction you’re going.”

After a few drafts and a couple email exchanges, Miss Robin felt guilty and apologized for being a “horrible client.” I did not tell her that I once worked on a logo project that took six years to get approved.

So I mocked up the above with yet another microphone that I reappropriated (design-speak for “stole”) from some random website (just as a placeholder, mind you). We settled on the typeface Dubba Dubba, which I liked for this project because the show took place at night and I think the typeface has a late-night cabaret feel to it. At Miss Robin’s request, I added some bevel and emboss effects to create a three-dimensional effect.

To my surprise, Miss Robin wrote back, “By George, I think you’ve got it! I love it, and more importantly, Tony loves it!” I set to work on replacing the stolen microphone image with an original (though it is still based on the found one) and submitted this:

Shortly after all of this, Tony Bruno’s future with the show was called into question and the logo never saw the light of day (until this post). Still, there were some valuable lessons to take from the experience. (Lesson #1: If you’re a public figure, hire a Twitter editor.)

Working with a client who has a clear, specific idea of what they want can be challenging. I actually liked my initial sketch better than any of the subsequent iterations, but because I would not have to live with the final result of this project the same way I do with materials that I create for my regular job at NAI, it was a little easier to take direction. (Blue? Sure! That font? Sure! 3D effects? Sure!)

Ultimately, it was an interesting and surprisingly enjoyable process, collaborating on a design project with people I know only as radio personalities. Of course, if Miss Robin had come to me looking for Comic Sans and type on a curve, I’d have had to put my Jean-Luc Picard face on: “The line must be drawn here!”

And now I’m off to listen to This American Life. I love listening to Ira Glass speak in 10-point Rockwell Light.

Moving to the Right (with my mohawk)

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Shea Lewis

Something about me has always made me want to question authority. (Or at the very least, ask someone in uniform politely why it is we do the things we do?) Perhaps it is the rebellious, “punk rock” nature that lives inside of me. Even though I don’t want to conform, I find myself following the rules all of the time. At least I know that the inner me has a crazy, wild mohawk (and hair, for that matter). I know we have rules for a reason, but sometimes it would be interesting to know why. For example, why do we drive on certain sides of the road?

This week in 1967, Sweden made a drastic change. Known to most as Högertrafikomläggningen (and by “most” I mean those who know what those two little dots over the letter A actually stand for), or H Day, which translates to “the right-hand traffic diversion,” when traffic changed driving on the left side of the road to the right side of the road. Implementing this change was no easy task, and was wildly unpopular. The decision was made based on Sweden being surrounded by right-side-of-the-road countries and the fact that most vehicles in Sweden were left-sided driven.

If you are still reading, the part about this that I found interesting (the same part you are no doubt wondering about right now as well) is that in order to help soothe the transition and ease those dealing with challenges associated with change, a logo was created. According to Wikipedia (the authority on all things Swedish and most other things): “The campaign included displaying the Dagen H logo on various commemorative items, including milk cartons, men’s shorts and women’s underwear.”

(Warning: You are about to read the most immature joke ever made on IBD. If you have moved on from being a sixth-grade boy, you will not find this funny. But considering our audience, I’m rolling the dice.) I always thought that anything that resembled a skid mark shouldn’t be placed on underwear. I digress and apologize.

The purpose behind the logo was to commemorate the change and to register an identity to items related to the change. I like the modified H representing the road. The Comic Sans-esque typeface, which is as unexpected in 1967 Sweden as being located on underwear, leaves something to be desired.

So you may be asking yourself, Why I am I still reading this and how did it all turn out? Well, since you asked, also according to Wikipedia:

On the Monday following Dagen H, there were 125 reported traffic accidents, compared to a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays. No fatal traffic accidents were attributed to the switch. Experts suggested that changing to driving on the right would reduce accidents as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead. Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result. Some of the decrease was attributed to a reduction in speed limits by 10 km/h for some time after the switch. The accident rate rose back to its original level within two years.

Intangible elements can be connected to logos. There is also value in placing an investment in carefully designing something that may seem insignificant or temporary at the time. You never know when something is going to become iconic or grow beyond its original purpose.

The logo lives on today on Facebook where you can “like” Dagen H. There are 12 people that “like this” page. 10,426 people “like” the page dedicated to mohawks.

How Many Legs Do Spiders Have? Voting Ends March 4!

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Paul Caputo

Let me start this discussion by saying I am proud to be an alumnus of the University of Richmond. I have fond memories of the academic experience, school spirit, and bikini-clad roller-bladers campus atmosphere. (And as a member of the pep band, a French major, and a newspaper columnist who railed against the Greek system, I was quite popular in college. At least, that’s what the frat guys told me as they duct-taped me to a lamp post every weekend.) I especially enjoyed that we had a unique mascot—the spider. And I mean unique in its literal sense; it’s one of a kind. We’re the only school in the United States with the spider as a mascot.

We occasionally write about branding and identity systems as they relate to sports here on IBD, so it was big news with me—as well as my fellow Spiders—when we learned recently that our mascot was getting a makeover. Not only that, but we would be allowed to vote on it.

Legend has it that the Spiders nickname came from a guy named Puss Ellyson, a pitcher on the university baseball team way back in the late 1800s, who earned the nickname “Spider” because of his abnormally long limbs. “Spidey,” as his name is officially not because of trademark law and Marvel Comics, is seen here in his current iteration.

This particular version of the mascot has been unpopular for several reasons. First and foremost (in my mind, anyway), it’s a little embarrassing that a university with one of the largest endowments per student in the nation is represented by a mascot that basically looks like a guy who was given $75 to spend in the campus book store.

Second, some of you naturalists out there might remember that spiders typically have eight legs. And while the closest thing to spiders—insects—have six legs, this mascot, I reiterate, basically looks like a guy with the normal human number of four limbs in shorts and a couple shirts. And also a cape. You’d figure that if only one school in the nation is going to be represented by a spider, it would get the number of limbs on its mascot correct.

So the UR community has been asked not only to vote on two new designs proposed by Rickabaugh Graphics in Columubus, Ohio, but to suggest names as well. The first option is called “Realistic” (with no apparent sense of irony). Just like in the wild, this realistic spider features web-launching cannons strapped to his wrist. For this one, I suggest the name Teenage Mutant Ninja Mascot.

I voted for the second option, called “Tough” (though I think of him as “Headband”). I like Headband, even if his face looks more like a schnauzer than a spider. He makes me think, “We’re gonna kick your butt in basketball (or possibly synchronized swimming), then we’re going jazzercizing.” For this option, I recommend the name “Olivia Newton Spider.”

Voting ends March 4, so I encourage all of you to go vote right away. (There’s a link where people not affiliated with Richmond can vote; I assume those results will be carefully tallied and ignored.) Results of the ballot will be announced in May.

(Image source: University of Richmond.)

The NAI 2011 Identity: Don’t Call it a Logo

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Paul Caputo

The National Association for Interpretation’s annual gathering of interpreters, the NAI National Workshop in Las Vegas, is over, and the holiday season is upon us. This means one important thing: I will be asleep for the next week. Please do not call.

For most attendees, the NAI National Workshop is a once-a-year professional development and networking event. For NAI staff, the National Workshop is like final exams. Everything we do all year long builds up to and is affected by the event. Then, once we’re there, we work 27 hours a day—mostly carrying boxes of books—and eat a lot of fried food.

My responsibilities as the visual communications guy at NAI mean that I am particularly affected by the Workshop all year long. Everything I produce includes the next Workshop’s identity somewhere within. I’ve had years when I couldn’t wait for the Workshop to happen so that I could stop looking at a logo that I hated. This year, I’m sad to see the Las Vegas event go because I liked our Vegas sign logo.

For the next year, I’ll be working with this identity for NAI 2011 in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’m using the word identity rather than logo this year because I don’t think the above really fits the true definition of a logo. It’s more a collection of visual elements than a single composition.

To me, unsuccessful logos try to do too much. When I create a logo, especially an event logo, I want to seize on one concept and play it up. The NAI 2011 identity supports the Workshop slogan (which comes from the volunteer Workshop committee), “Heartland Homecoming: Great Places. Great Minds. Great Times.” The idea is that one of the biggest values of NAI Workshops is the conversations that we have outside the sessions and the official functions. To me, two mugs of hot chocolate are emblematic of those moments.

We had these two mugs made at zazzle.com and will auction them off next November in Minnesota. To get the photo of the mugs that I’m using, I went with our mysterious and reclusive third author, diehard Texas Rangers fan Lisa Brochu, to the local Dazbog coffee shop, where cheerful baristas artfully crafted the whipped cream and chocolate sauce sculptures you see pictured atop the mugs. It was a race against time to get the photos, though, because warm whipped cream loses its form quickly, and Lisa loves hot chocolate. In the photo, we lined them up so that the slogan and workshop information can be read from one mug to the other.

In terms of the color, we chose a soothing, analogous blue scheme, which represents both the crisp, cool weather of an Upper Midwest November and one of Minnesota’s notable natural features, its preponderance of lakes.

Speaking of the lakes, my first sketches for an identity for NAI 2011 featured these 10,000 blue dots (go ahead, count them), a reference to Minnesota’s slogan, “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Although according to Friend of IBD and Minnesota resident Chris Evans, Minnesota is actually home to 11,842 lakes. I think they should change the slogan on the license plates to “Land of at Least 10,000 Lakes.” I like the dots because they create a visual texture based on a meaningful concept, though they don’t really work for a logo. (Imagine trying to embroider them on a hat.)

Everyone I showed the dots hated them, and one person thought it was one of those trick posters with the hidden images that you see if you can unfocus your eyes. (That person stared at my computer screen for five minutes, then took a four-hour nap.) So I did what any responsible graphic designer would do: I muttered under my breath and hid the dots in another composition. Then I vowed silently to myself: It took a long time to create a composition of exactly 10,000 dots and, dammit, I’m going to use them.

That’s why if you look at the magazine ad for the workshop pictured here, you’ll see the dots behind the type at the top of the page. While the main identity for the workshop will be the mugs, which will be supported by type set in varying thicknesses of Helvetica (because that worked so well for the Gap), I’ll also use the 10,000 dots as a supporting visual element in the Workshop website and promotional materials.

I’m aware that the NAI 2011 identity is a departure from a typical event logo. I’m not sure if I explored something nontraditional because I’ve been doing these logos for eight years and wanted to do something a little different, or if it’s because a design opportunity presented itself and we went with it. Mostly, I think we just seized an excuse to get hot chocolate at Dazbog.

Though as I wrap this post up, I’m becoming aware of an inherent danger in this little NAI 2011 experiment: I am craving hot chocolate.

Opening Day: Here Come the Flying Squirrels

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Paul Caputo

Our long national nightmare is over. I’ve gotten through the winter with halfhearted attempts at being interested in professional football and college basketball, repeated viewings of the United Breaks Guitars video on YouTube, and even interacting with my wife and children. As of today—Opening Day for Major League Baseball—baseball is back and so is the bounce in my step.

Regular readers of this site know that when it comes to sports, Shea and I are primarily fans of Major League Baseball, and write about it often. I root for the Phillies because I grew up in the Philadelphia area and still enjoy my connection through family and friends to a community that supports the local team. Shea roots for the Yankees because they have the most money and are therefore likely to win every year.

Way back in the 1990s, I lived in Richmond, Virginia, for three years between college and graduate school, mostly working part-time jobs that either paid terribly or that I hated (frequently both). One job that I actually liked (but that paid the worst of all) was as the sports editor for a short-lived weekly newspaper called The Richmond State. As sports editor, I had a press pass to cover the Richmond Braves, the Triple-A minor league affiliate of the hateful Atlanta Braves. Covering the Richmond Braves primarily entailed eating a free dinner in the press box with real sports writers during the first two innings, watching the rest of the game with friends in the left field upper deck seats, and then once a week writing 200 words pulled mostly from press releases. (No wonder The Richmond State wasn’t around long.)

Another job that I had in Richmond was as a video editor for a local news station, NBC affiliate WWBT Channel 12, where I worked alongside (okay, near) now-famous CNN news hottie Campbell Brown. We would have conversations like this:

Campbell Brown: Hey, fat, red-headed video editor. I need this video edited in time for the 6:00 news.

Me: Wow. Hi, Campbell. You’re attractive. It’s Paul, actually. Will you go out with me?

Campbell Brown: No. Will you edit this tape please?

Me: How about just being seen near me in public?

Campbell Brown: No. Edit the tape.

Me: You know, you may go on to be a wildly successful news personality with your own show on a national network some day, but I’m going to write a blog on the Internet and I may not actually know what those words mean right now but we’re going to get literally DOZENS OF HITS EVERY DAY. And then you’re going to wish you were NICER TO THE LITTLE PEOPLE!

[Long silence.]

Campbell Brown: Phil, will you please edit this videotape?

Anyway, the point is, I think, that I really enjoyed being close to minor league baseball. As much as I love baseball played at its highest level (as it is in Philadelphia and the Bronx these days), I also love the local, friendly atmosphere of minor league ball. So I was a little sad when I learned recently that the hateful Atlanta Braves had relocated their Triple-A affiliate from Richmond to somewhere in Georgia.

Then I learned that Richmond was getting a new team, the Double-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. And as with any new minor league team hoping to maximize its marketing potential, they weren’t going to be called something boring like the Richmond Giants. No, they were going to be called something strange and meaningless. To that end, the team opened the naming process to a public competition, which dutifully selected a bizarre mascot that has nothing to do with Richmond—the Flying Squirrels. (When the National Association for Interpretation unveiled its new logo in 2007, one disappointed member wrote to say that the new logo should have been designed as a part of a competition and selected through a vote by the membership. Had we done that, I wonder if NAI would have ended up with something like a flying squirrel as the new identity of the organization.)

The Flying Squirrels unveiled their logo, which includes the primary version at the top of this post as well as the three alternate versions here, at a press conference late last year. A minor league baseball website had this to say about it:

The logo, designed by San Diego-based ideas company Plan B Branding, features what the team describes as a “sleek, angular flying squirrel in mid-flight.” This logo utilizes the team’s color scheme, which consists of black, “radiant red” and a previously unquantifiable hue now known as “squirrels silver.”

I don’t mind odd names for minor league teams. The minor leagues are filled with teams with names like the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Lansing Lugnuts, Savannah Sand Gnats, and NAI Interpretators. (Okay, that last one is just a softball team I’ve been trying to start, but the others are real.) Though many of these wacky names seem like thinly veiled attempts to sell gear, most of them seem to have at least some small connection to a local cultural element or natural feature.

Richmond’s new baseball team’s logo was designed by a firm on the other side of the country and the mascot has nothing to do with the city or the area. I’m not sure what a more appropriate name would have been (maybe the Tobacco Hawks or the Civil War Runners-Up—I’m still working on it), but sports teams can represent cities in many ways and Richmond’s does not.

If an interpreter had been involved in making this decision, he or she would have pointed out that the name of a sports team is an opportunity to make a thematic choice, to say something meaningful. Instead, when the Richmond Flying Squirrels take the field for the first time ever this Thursday, what the city will get is a wacky novelty that may sell a few T-shirts, but says nothing about the place.

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