I didn’t get to post this past week – slammed with stuff going on. A couple of pieces I worked on were this sea turtle – oil on canvas and my drawing of Babe the Blue Ox which next week…or maybe after I do a couple more…I’ll take and digitally color and hopefully we’ll have a pretty cool Americana series. Any rate…now that I’ve gone over something I enjoy, let’s cringe and find out what’s going on with logos this month…
Logos change…usually it’s an indication that a company or entity is turning sort of a new chapter in its existence, so that’s totally fine IMO…If you’ve watched any of my livestreams or read some of my other posts, you know I’m a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan.
The SP heart logo evolved over different periods of the band’s existence. In the 1990’s, the classic drawn looking heart, then after a hiatus the “band” reformed in 2007 and featured the middle sort of etched looking heart and then finally with the last couple of albums – which are notably different from the other ones since 2007, there’s a very clean, vector logo design.
Then, there’s logos that get changed for really no notable reason, change for the sake of change, or change because rather than being a solid pillar, a company is blowing with the fickle changes in society – enter The Punisher.
The Punisher
Imagine Batman, then take away all the tech, gadgets, suit, ethical lines he draws and you’ve basically got The Punisher. He’s a Marvel character – admittedly I only really followed Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps and Batman when I read comics regularly, but that’s not the point.
The Punisher’s logo is a skull with a long sort of tooth area. It’s a good logo, really in the family of the Jolly Roger.(that’s the pirate skull flags for those who don’t know, they used the imagery to strike dread in their target). It’s very 1980’s, when skull stuff was very in style. In the past couple of decades it’s been co-opted by military and police officers…going into dangerous situations, you can imagine they’d need some air of confidence and badassery and to try to de-escalate a situation by putting fear into an enemy…
All good and fine
Until we’re in a world of extreme polarization and one side deems the other side can’t have anything…perhaps not even existence…so the creator and the actor in The Punisher films are so distraught over the idea of Trump supporters and police officers using the symbol of the character that they ran a virtue signal campaign in which they…seemingly provided a template for artists of color to write “BLM” and other phrases over the…basically the same skull logo..this campaign just seemed contrived and not genuine. This is a character, mind you, who kidnaps, murders and tortures…
Pabst Blue Ribbon
PBR isn’t exactly changing their logo, but rather the brand puts artwork on their beer cans via contest entry and yesterday the winner of the 2021 cans was announced. Just full disclosure, I entered said contest. Deep down I knew if I was going to go far in this I was going to have to employ the shitty corporate tech art style – ultimately I couldn’t bring myself to, so I didn’t make it to round 2.
And that’s fine. The winner of the contest is the above right said shitty corporate tech art style with the runner up beside it. PBR’s a hipster brand, so this is somewhat expected from the people in the company. What I refuse to believe however is that the public actually voted for these two pieces of shit to be the top two. Nope, I don’t buy it, I don’t believe this many people collectively have this shitty taste…but then again they are drinking PBR…
Peugeot
There seems to be unilateral movement by car companies to re-image their logos this year, all centering around the idea of being “electric.” From the changes I’ve seen, my guess would be that since these changes are based around the auto industry looking to go electric, a feature of these vehicles will be a lightup logo somewhere in the vehicle, perhaps the steering wheel to further convey electric…sort of like how a laptop has backlighting in the keys.
Where Peugeot was featuring a zombified felinoid thing, it has switched now to a more prominent and refined lion’s profile within a shield. It’ll look pretty sweet and clean lit up.
NBA
Evidently, basketball player Kyrie Irving posted a tweet saying Kobe Bryant should be the new NBA logo and replace the current silhouette of Jerry West. Irving’s tweet had blatant racial implications. Naturally the twitterati swooned over the idea – replace the white guy with the black guy, to even question is…well, pick an “ist,” any “ist.” Of course, as we’ve seen with other black individuals, such as Aunt Jemima, the Cream of Wheat guy…one has to wonder, if the outline had already been of a black NBA player, would the demand now be it be removed???
No matter the thought about Irving and twitter’s motivations, if we go back to what I was saying about logo changes being markers of a new era in an entity’s existence, then the logo change now might make sense. Under the previous logo…we’d consider it the classic logo and the era of greats spanning from Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Jordan, Kobe, up to Lebron. The NBA has been by and large, American centric, but now, China is a major factor and influence on the NBA and could mark a new era in the league.
To be clear, I think Kobe is a fine choice if there were to be an upgrade…although personally, I think if we’re going on greatness Michael Jordan would be the ideal basketball player for anyone. If the league is in decline though, I wouldn’t want its detractors having that as some kind of ammo either.
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