Origin of our love for logos

[TheFloridianLogoMan]

It's no secret that for some of us, logo art and design is not just an interest, it's a passion. Like everything, that also has it's beginnings deep in our lives.

For me, I remember as a 5 year old, if you can believe it, collecting baseball cards and drawing the logos I saw on them using Crayolas and notebook paper. And in fact, both my mother and my grandmother have told me that, at an even younger age, I pointed out the Visa and Mastercard logos on businesses (I'm guessing using a combination of color recognition and commercial watching at that age).

So, when did your love for logos begin?

(P.S., I hope this is acceptable for this forum, if you move it, I apologize in advance)

[BigBubba]

I remember when I was 7 or 8, I drew out a hockey uniform template and spent a few hours designing the jersey for a team called the "Narwhals". I spent so much time making sure the striping, shoulder patches, socks, logo, etc... were all how I wanted them to be. It's wierd, because I've always been into uniforms, but it wasn't until I joined here that I became a freak (i.e. Someone who would be upset at a team sporting a throwback jersey because "it uses the 1982 piping with the 1983 of blue").

[panthers_2012]

Let's see...I just wanted to learn this history of the Cleveland Indians logo and I search Google for sports logos and behold...this was the first to pop up! I've been a follower of CC for about 5 years and I've been obssessed with logos ever since. I love the history behind the logos. And seeing some of the old uniforms adds a nice touch. I love CCSLC!

[mattwillcox]

I can remember back to when I was about 5, I got a colouring book with line art for the mask of every single NHL starting goalie. My dad took me out to buy a giant box of crayons because I wanted to get all of the colours right. As I got older I started doing logos for imaginary teams, and here I am now talking about uniforms with all of you and designing as a way to make money.

[drdougfresh]

Kinda the same way as Matt, I started out as a young lad with coloring books. I was always a big fan of art as a kid, and i spent a lot of time drawing and tracing -- and I recreated all of NASCAR's track logos and all of the NHL logos for fun/wall art for my room (before google and the Internet, oy!). I actually started getting into creating my own sports logos a little later (10 or so) when I created an imaginary hockey league, complete with logos and fake rosters. Probably 16 or so teams -- and I'm still beating myself up over losing that, thanks to CJ's incredible revival of his own childhood league.

Good thread idea!

[wildwing64]

I don't think I gave all that much thought to logos as a kid. Sure, I noticed differences in past and redesigned versions of logos, casually observing as they slowly got better or worse, but I never thought about how much a good logo truly matters until I became an Anaheim Ducks fan.

I know I talk about it a lot on these boards, probably more than I should, but I really, really like that duck mask logo. It looks great to me, and since I grew up more with cartoons and videogames and less with sports, I found it easy to identify with. But I think my fascination with logos came about after they announced they were rebranding, and then after months of excitement and anticipation, it happened; I had mixed feelings about the wordmark then, and I have mixed, mostly negative feelings about it today. Having the soul sucked out of my favourite team's identity in favour of a half-arsed text based logo bugs me to no end. In fact I'd say I felt alienated after the rebrand, and I still sorta do today. Since then I've been hoping for either something better or the return of the duck mask as the primary logo.

As I've observed and contributed to the Concepts board here and as my own design skills have improved over time, I've been turning my passion for logos into both a hobby and a profession. Now, I can look at my favourite team's soulless text logo and say "I can do better than that."

[Gothamite]

I remember reading the paper as a kid and getting really excited about a "new look" team, only to find out that the term invariably referred to a changed roster.

[rainmaker17]

I'd say the Sears catalog. I couldn't wait for the new one to come out and would spend hours looking at the NFL merchandise.

[dbadefense1990]

To me, my desire of logos is traced to how they're presented in live television. Growing up in the 1990s, I always craved how sports logos are animated, to the background of an arena, a stadium, or a live aerial blimp shot of the venue or the city. It brought into context the world around the sporting event when such event happened, based on the animation of a team logo or event logo with the background juxtapositioned. I have a fascination of history, and what the world was like in the time of the historical sporting event, like what the people wore, how urbanized was the city, and what were the social and cultural trends like back in the day. Seeing sports logos, then seeing them being graphically animated on TV in an intro to a major sports event, or sponsor plug ("...is brought to you by...") or any other related situation gives me serious goosebumps, especially if those sports events become instantaneous classics which will live forever.

[CS85]

Trying to think to one specific moment, there's not really one. I do have some ideas, though:

• The idea behind branding and re-branding was really what I loved. I was fascinated by the idea that you could take one entity's idea, change some aesthetics, and poof - that same entity could be entirely redefined by a new look. I think the Batman logo from the movies was the first one I can point to.
  
  • The Batman logos for the 1989 eponymous film and for the 1992 Batman Returns film were identical, sans one being colorful and the other being white. It doesn't look like much, but I loved that the first film used the black/orange/grim-warm color palette to echo the logo on the poster/box art. The sequel similarly reflected it's logo by being very stark with blacks, whites, and shades of grey.
    

  [*]Professional wrestling was another part of it. Rebranding a wrestler as they went from heel to face, especially in the 90's, was much less uniform than it is now. When Shawn Michaels took a huge babyface turn in the mid-90's his ring attire went from a lot of black and red to white and gold (although he still mixed things up). The NWO's Hollywood/Wolfpac and D-Generation X were big stable brands that defined wrestlers and it made a simple set of colors so incredibly exciting.

  [*]Sports logos didn't come around until an obscure game called

  found it's way into my crappy old computer's disc drive. This game didn't use the official MLB logos but gave each team the appropriate rosters and colors. The Cubs logo was this dumbass C/Bat logo that was painfully generic, and I wanted to recreate the actual logo. The logo editor was thankfully available, but in order to make it look good I had to go pixel-by-pixel for perfect accuracy.
  • This began a fascination with msPaint. I would spend/waste countless hours recreating logos and going for accurate shading by zooming all the way in and poring over various shades of color to replicate realism. This insane toil made my photoshop boner explode once I realized I could do all sorts of fun stuff in that program years later (re: I used drop shadow and outer glow. A lot.).
    

All this crap made me really appreciate and embrace identity and branding as more than just some new colors.

[marble21]

I think mine is similar to the 3rd main point above. It all started when I played the FIFA video game series (starting around '99) and would spend longer editing the teams kits to what I would prefer them to be than actually playing the matches in the game itself.

This evolved and became more in depth as the video games became more advanced. Nothing has really changed though.

I do still tend to spend more time on the likes of diamond dynasty, teambuilder and the creation centre, although this is because I enjoy it and not because I am obsessed with it (I hope).

[BadSeed84]

I think the earliest origins for me would be the wwf logo, and always drawing it (drawing the neon version was always fun) I remember in grade school drawing the wrestlemania x logo cause I thought (and still think) it was so cool looking.

Sports logos I always marveled at too I remember mellon psfs banks having phillies hologram stickers, some would be of the older 80s city hall logo, also seeing all the mlb teams logos on the outfield wall was cool too and made me interested.

[Bayne]

Earliest logo related hobby/passtime of mine was scanning each individual logo for the AFL teams in Australia and then reprinting them bigger so I could cut them out meticulously and mount them on cardboard cutouts and them arrange them on the wall according to the current standings at the time. This was back when scanners first came out so looking back it was pretty dodgy, but I loved that little paper ladder I had.

[KDubK414]

I think the earliest origins for me would be the wwf logo, and always drawing it (drawing the neon version was always fun) I remember in grade school drawing the wrestlemania x logo cause I thought (and still think) it was so cool looking.

Sports logos I always marveled at too I remember mellon psfs banks having phillies hologram stickers, some would be of the older 80s city hall logo, also seeing all the mlb teams logos on the outfield wall was cool too and made me interested.

Holy Crap!!! I drew the WMX logo too. My aunt and uncle always recorded WrestleMania for me. When I saw that logo I thought it was so awesome, that I drew it on paper and slapped it on the generic VHS cover that came with it. I did the same on the stickers that you would adhere to the cassette itself. I'll have to find that, snap a pic and post it here, and add to my story of why I grew to love logos and design.

[raysfan24]

When I was in middle school, I would always be in math and instead of taking notes like I should've, I would draw simple letter logos on the top of my paper like Cincinnati's wishbone "C" and the Yankees "NY". After my freshman year in college, I came home and my dad and I went through some of his old baseball cards which were from the 70's and 80's. I was fascinated at how the uniforms and logos had changed over the years and I started to fall in love with some of the old designs. I got interested and eventually found this site one day while searching for a logo on the internet. In 2010, I joined as a member here on the boards and ever since, my love for sports logos has grew.

[FGM13]

I remember when I was 7 or 8, I drew out a hockey uniform template and spent a few hours designing the jersey for a team called the "Narwhals". I spent so much time making sure the striping, shoulder patches, socks, logo, etc... were all how I wanted them to be. It's wierd, because I've always been into uniforms, but it wasn't until I joined here that I became a freak (i.e. Someone who would be upset at a team sporting a throwback jersey because "it uses the 1982 piping with the 1983 of blue").

Mine started basically the same way, with a team called the Ottawa Titans. I stayed in my dad's classroom(he's a teacher) after school one day and drew jerseys to pass the time.

[tBBP]

My story is kinda stupid, but here goes...

...All my prepubescent life, all I thought about was architecture—specifically residental homes, so much so that I clearly remember tearing through newspapers looking for the new homes/new neighborhoods sections just to see all the new floor plans. It eventually got to where I would ride my bike around to all the open house locations in all the new neighborhoods that were being built back home at the time (and yes, my mother was perfectly okay with 9, 10, 11-year-old me doing this, especially if it kept me out the house), and I just remember studying them, then drawing them, then eventually came up with floor plans and elevations of my own (or at least what I knew of then at the time).

Around that same time, the first Mighty Ducks movie came out, and not long after, Pensacola got the Ice Pilots ECHL team. This may have been where this started, as I got to looking at every other teams' nicknames, uniforms and logos, and crowing to myself over which ones I really liked and which ones really sucked (like Pensacola's—I hated it). Around this same time my middle school was rumored to be starting a football team, so imaginative me took to scribbling a logo and uniform set for us. Sometime after that, I ended up creating my own fictitious football league made up of "fictional" teams that borrowed nicknames from all the middle schools in the area, as long as some completely made-up ones. I made up the logos on my own, and would get football magazines, tear out the pages with player pictures on them, tape them to our patio door, trace them (that's called a "ghetto light table"), and pretty much design my own uniforms. I did a lot of that in middle and up through high school. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also found myself compelled with television news graphics—you know, the name bars, side bars & all that jazz—and took to creating my own on my then-hi-tech IBM computer with Windows 3.1 (that oh by the way I got pretty good at doing Q-BASIC programming with...who else remembers that? )

So why did I mention the whole architecture story? Well...my junior year of HS I finally decided to take a drafting class...and boy did I mess up. Sure, my technical sketches were nice, but it was at that point that I realized just how terrible I was at math (and anyone in the architecture field can tell you just how much math it involves), so I pretty much knew I had no future in that, especially since I barely managed to pass Algebra II...in my senior year. And it was actually in that class that the light bulb went off...on the walk hung a poster listing many of the different career fields high schoolers choose to go to college for, listing everything from law to architecture to medical, engineering, all of it, and next to all these concentrations were columns denoting what skills were necessary—English, math, writing, science, so on, so forth. So I looked at all the ones that didn't involve math—and one of them was something called graphic design, a term that I'd never heard of before then. So I asked my algebra teacher what graphic design was, and once she told me, that's when I realized that that's what I'd been doing all along with all that stuff I'd been doing with the sports logos and uniforms along with the TV news graphics. A seed was planted that day and, well...the rest is history.

TL;DR: Was originally all about architecture til I realized I sucked at math but was still pretty good at art, had created a bunch of fictitious teams with fictitious identities, then found out there was actually a college degree and career field for that stuff—and the rest is history.

[BrandMooreArt]

i've always been into art and sports. as a kid i remember when the Jaguars and Panthers were introduced and really loving their logos, and i went through a phase where i was drawing a load of Bulls and Hornets logos for my classmates. but my main focus was always other kinds of art. manga, comic art, oil landscapes, charcoal, street art, and definitely car drawings.

the combination of sports and design didn't really take hold til i was in college when i took my Logos And Icons class. one of the projects we had was to create an NFL team identity in a new city. actually, the logo in my avatar is the one i did for that project, the Omaha Outlaws. that was the 2nd or 3rd original logo design i ever created. after the class and seeing all the projects together, i felt like logos and branding was something that i could do well, it just clicked for me. and i realized that this could be done in the sports world too, like someone actually sat down and designed all these NFL and sports logos. that was a huge moment for me

[TalktoChuck]

I can remember back to when I was about 5, I got a colouring book with line art for the mask of every single NHL starting goalie. My dad took me out to buy a giant box of crayons because I wanted to get all of the colours right. As I got older I started doing logos for imaginary teams, and here I am now talking about uniforms with all of you and designing as a way to make money.

I had that same coloring book! Spent the majority of my nights coloring those goalie masks. I also had a coloring book of MLB hats and logos.

[themaddesigner]

i've always been into art and sports. as a kid i remember when the Jaguars and Panthers were introduced and really loving their logos, and i went through a phase where i was drawing a load of Bulls and Hornets logos for my classmates.

I remember as a kid breaking down each shape of the Bulls logo until I was able to sketch it perfectly with no reference. I guess it was the impetus.