MLS Expansion Club St Louis City SC Unveils Name and Logo

[PlayGloria]

1 hour ago, GFB said:

The colors are great; like the Cardinals, only bolder.

 

Everything else is not my cup of tea. I have a sinking feeling that the crest is going to look terribly dated in 5 years when trends change and rotated text goes out of style. 

 

I actually said to myself that it reminds me of the Cards road uniforms with the navy blue caps. 

[tBBP]

6 hours ago, PaleVermilion81 said:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MLS/comments/i91n96/st_louis_city_sc_logo_leak/

 

 

3 hours ago, Maroon said:

The whole shebang right here, including full colors:

 

 

 

I knew it...I straight called it on the colors. Being that this is also my hometown Wahoos' colorway (minus the yellow), I'm already predisposed to liking the color scheme--and it is at least some kind of unique to MLS.

 

That crest, though? In the voice of Randy Jackson, "that's gonna be a hard pass from me, dawg."  I want to see the design brief on this so I can see what they were aiming at.  This thing looks almost too much like the advertising flags you see outside fairs and hew home developments, not to mention the banners that sometimes hang on the sides of stadia:

 

Points for at least trying their hand at abstraction, but that execution fell way short of the mark. The arch is what is is, but its tough to make out whether the lines are supposed to be I-44/64/55/70/Stan Musial Bridge, the rivers, or something else.  

[Around the Horn]

@8BW14's AC St. Louis concept is so much better than what they actually came up with.

[Maroon]

1 hour ago, -kj said:

 

Eh.  Having grown up in the area, I'm very familiar with the flag, and it took quite a bit to see those lines as representing the rivers.

 

As for the colors: I don't mind the magenta and navy idea... just don't tell me it's red.

 

 

That's fair. I guess I I just automatically saw the rivers when I looked at it because I was anticipating that the flag would be incorporated somehow. My expectations informed reality, perhaps.

 

It's definitely not red. A friend of mine who is basically a soccer/football fan only and is also excited about this team has commented on how he's going to look like a dragonfruit at games.

[_RH_]

[Dynasty]

Comparing it to the other red teams, St. Louis' red is definitely "pinker" (and more hard on the eyes). At first I thought they were trying to mimic their baseball club, but this red is notably brighter than the Cardinals'.

[BC985]

Here we are in 2020 expressing how dated this crest will look in 5 years. This club won't play its first match for another 2.5 years. Unless they decide to rebrand before they even start, this will be the identity of the club for possibly the next decade at least. 

[Eastport76]

Meh. I still prefer @mcrosby’s St Louis concept. 
 

[mcrosby]

37 minutes ago, Eastport76 said:

Meh. I still prefer @mcrosby’s St Louis concept. 
 

I updated it a smidge recently: 

[Gothamite]

3 hours ago, Primzahl said:

is there an updated version of this?

 

2 hours ago, -kj said:

I suspect @Gothamite will get around to it.

 

Ooo, that's an old one.  There's been a several updates since then.  New teams, one new badge, and a couple updated shields have since been changed.

 

Here's the most recent version, I just need to patch the placeholders for Charlotte and St. Louis.

 

 

 

[The_Admiral]

[ghost316]

24 minutes ago, mcrosby said:

I updated it a smidge recently: 

 

Wasn't the "St. Louis Olympiques" name more relevant to field lacrosse at the 1904 Olympics?

[Brian in Boston]

OOF! The only thing more underwhelming than introducing your new professional soccer team's brand identity in the midst of a pandemic to an empty auditorium filled with cardboard cutouts of people is introducing THIS brand identity under such circumstances.

Name / Wordmark
The team name - particularly the emphasis on CITY - is tone deaf given the acrimony that has historically existed between the municipality and surrounding St. Louis County since the 1840s. Team ownership can trumpet all it likes about how "the name celebrates the area's diverse, iconic neighborhoods"... blah, blah, blah... "region's recent growth"... blah, blah, blah... "cultural renaissance"... blah, blah, blah. All of those niceties aside, the fact remains that following the official split of the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County in the 1870s, the invisible political barrier that separates the two entities has been a continual source of friction with very real socioeconomic impact visited upon residents of both the city and surrounding, independent communities. Anger, mutual misunderstanding, and resentment has been a very real part of the relationship between those who call the city home and those who reside in municipalities within the county. A chorus of "Kumbayah" under the St. Louis City SC - pardon, St. Louis CITY SC - name isn't going to suddenly make that disconnect disappear, no matter how much Carolyn Kindle Betz and Company might want it to. 

You want your Major League Soccer franchise to serve as a rallying point for the entirety of the St. Louis Metro Area, both city and county residents? Here's a tip - don't play up one half of the region's historic city/county divide in the team's name. Instead, try leaning into "the city's rich soccer tradition as America's First Soccer Capital" and go with a name like St. Louis Legacy SC. Or, if you truly want your club "to be bigger than soccer... and a symbol of [the region's] future",  adopt a name like Gateway St. Louis SC. There's just no upside in even remotely running the risk of antagonizing either side of the traditional city/county schism.   

Colors
I'm a fan of the City (Not) Red and River Blue. They complement one another nicely, with the Raspberry/Magenta shade of red particularly unique upon the North American pro sports landscape. With the iconic Gateway Arch destined to play such a significant role in team branding, Arch Steel Gray also strikes me as a welcome part of the club's palette. All of that said, the Energy Yellow gives me pause. I get that the team is trying to come up with its take on the Red, Blue, and Yellow of the St. Louis municipal flag, but I fear that the Energy Yellow is going to be overkill, particularly when paired with the City Red. I found the combination over-the-top when used in the teaser videos leading up to the identity unveiling and I'm not at all convinced it's going to prove any more pleasing when utilized in logo or uniform applications. If it were me, and I wanted to include a nod to the flag's Yellow, I'd have taken a page from Cerezo Osaka's book and gone with more of a Gold.  

Crest
When I learned that "[a] diverse group of over 20 local designers created" the St. Louis City SC crest, I couldn't help but think "design-by-committee" and "too many cooks spoil the broth". I can't say for certain that the number of designers led to what I consider to be a misfire, but I don't believe the scenario helped matters.

It strikes me as being a very disjointed mark, with little thought given to how the various components of the logo might most effectively integrate. For instance, the description of the crest says that the top of the shield "[f]ollows the shape of the Gateway Arch". Except it doesn't, really. Not quite. Given that the top of the shield and the top of the depiction of the Gateway Arch within the shield are rendered at two different sizes, they follow one another's shape for what amounts to a very short length of space. If anything, the curve at the top of the shield and the depiction of the Gateway Arch within the crest serve to inspire one to wonder why the designers didn't elect to enlarge the Gateway Arch and shift it upward within the logo so that it's curve would define the curved portion of the top of the shield. It seems a lost opportunity, aesthetically, not to do so.

Then there's the logo's depiction of the Gateway Arch itself. It really doesn't reflect the actual structure very well. The angle at which the legs descend and the curve of the upper section are all wrong. While I understand that this is an "abstract representation of the iconic landmark", given that it is arguably the centerpiece image within the crest's design, it just seems to me that more care should have been taken to render its depiction a bit more accurately. And speaking of accuracy, I can't help but think that I'd like to see how the badge might have looked with the Gateway Arch rendered in Arch Steel Gray, as opposed to City Red. 

Similarly, I wonder how the depictions of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers would look if the outer lines of said waterways were rendered in White, with the center lines remaining River Blue? I'll concede that it might be a bit busy, but it would be interesting to see the contrast compared to the current color way that leaves the Arch and Rivers resembling - at least to my mind - an abstract depiction of a highway interchange.

The righthand third of the crest is, to put it bluntly, abysmal. The band of City Red cutting off nearly half of the depiction of the Gateway Arch, as well as the rotated word mark descending down said strip of color, come across as design decisions made solely for the sake of trying something "new" and "outside the box", with little thought given to how they might have been better incorporated into the crest's overall design.

Overall, St. Louis City SC's logo strikes me as looking like an early draft within the conceptualization and design of a major professional sports franchise's logo. I don't consider it a successful finished product. I'd say it's a missed opportunity that ranks in the bottom half of MLS club marks and, off the top of my head, may well slot in amongst the bottom third of the league's team logos.                      
            

     

  

[TrueYankee26]

Pink is technically a pale red so... they are right?

 

But the hue makes it raspberry which is close to magenta on the color scale so once again maybe not.

Edited August 14, 2020 by TrueYankee26

[gosioux76]

Admittedly overthinking this now, but I wonder if the red strip on the right of the crest might be a tease to an eventual jersey design. 
 

I could see a vertical stripe going up the left third of the jersey, over the crest, in much the same way.

[-kj]

36 minutes ago, Brian in Boston said:

an abstract depiction of a highway interchange

 

Jeebus, that's really it.  70 to the left, 40 from the bottom, 44/55 on the right.

[FiddySicks]

8 hours ago, Digby said:

 

Wait sorry to thread jack, but is this a commonly held opinion? I thought Cincy's USL look was awful, just that honkin' huge helvetica FC and the soccer ball crown missing an outline and bright vibrant color-clash everywhere.

I’m personally not a huge fan of their USL look, but it served its purpose well enough and I think was distinctive enough to at least be memorable. Their MLS look, otoh, is an absolute train wreck. That’s the biggest issue. Their old look was sort of meh and left a lot of room for improvement, yet is still head and shoulders what they went with for MLS. 

[-kj]

7 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

I’m personally not a huge fan of their USL look, but it served its purpose well enough and I think was distinctive enough to at least be memorable. Their MLS look, otoh, is an absolute train wreck. That’s the biggest issue. Their old look was sort of meh and left a lot of room for improvement, yet is still head and shoulders what they went with for MLS. 

 

I thought you were talking about St. Louis at first, because yeah.

 

I thought Cincinnati actually improved their crest a lot... it's just that they had a long, long way to go to be good and didn't really reach it.

[Gothamite]

Whoops, St. Louis.  
 

 

[sky1324]

3 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

Whoops, St. Louis.  
 

 

Oh man, that's far too close to be coincidence. Same colors, same font, same outline/fill style, oh no. MLS better get on this real quick, MPLS City might have a decent lawsuit to file. I like the Thieves nickname, though.