Having logo ≠ entitled success

People seem to like having logos.  Logos for themselves, logos for their businesses, companies or other identities that they feel necessitate some sort of visual symbolization so that they can hope to one day be easily identifiable by an image and not even need words.

However, for every single Nike, Honda, Target and even Chili’s that have successfully ingrained their visual identities with the people for so long that they don’t even have to use actual words in their branding anymore, there are probably a million failures of logos in the world for people, businesses and other entities that in all likelihood, abandoned their ideas not long after concepting their logos in the first place.

It’s like logo design always seems to come first, and then people think they can build around it, or so it seems, based on the frequency in which this tends to occur.  Coming soon businesses announce their presences with nothing more than a generic press release and a logo often way too abstract to interpret.  Restaurants that haven’t opened yet unveil logos, signs and the visual identities of their menus before they’ve even served a plate of food.  And then there are the thousands of pleebs who think they have a great idea for a project, but before they launch anything, they make themselves a logo, share it on social media to farm likes, but then the drive to actually do anything with their project, it runs out of steam and then they log into Steam and play video games, but not after a poor logo is left and abandoned on the internet for others to witness their fleeting false dedication.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking here which is nothing out of the ordinary since I have a tendency to poorly veil rants about other things in posts that initially are spurred by a slightly relevant topic.

So in honor of the 2019 Super Bowl, the City of Atlanta has rolled out, a logo (!!), to commemorate the unfortunate reality that Atlanta is the city that gets to be the schmucks who get to be commercially ransacked and bled by what bureaucrats and politicians will undoubtedly trump as a massive, national success story and economic boon, in attracting the grandest sporting event of the year to the city.

Yeah, hurrah, oh boy, and all that shit.  I just know I’m going to avoid doing anything in the city proper in that weekend in February, because the Super Bowl is notorious for bringing more headache, inconvenience, and in some cases, crime to cities than the NFL would care to admit to, but hey who needs to concern themselves with the residents and the inconsequential pleebs who exist in host cities on a daily basis, when there’s corporate fellating to do all around.

Back to the logo, which was the reason why I started writing in the first place: it looks stupid and I hate it, on top of thinking it’s completely unnecessary and a waste of money and resources.  It took all of two full seconds for me to take one look at the logo, and immediately correlate it with a balled-up piece of paper, ready to be tossed into the trash while yelling “KOBE!” because that’s exactly what it looks like.

Whenever a high-profile logo like this comes out, I always like reading the story behind it, to see what kind of bullshit rhetoric those in charge of its conception spout, because I know that in most cases, there’s actually no logical thought behind it, or that there are some minds so abstract that not even Pablo Picasso would be able to figure out what the fuck these so-called artists are doing.

So apparently, the ball of trash is supposed to be representative of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which isn’t at all surprising, because it still looks like what Megatron’s butthole would look like.  The red lines are supposed to represent the retractable panels of the roof, which okay, I’m not sure how red lines bent at a 100-degree angle is supposed to represent that but sure.  Ugly and incomprehensible as it may look, at least there’s a thought behind having them.

Now the gray lines intertwined through the middle though, now that’s some of that corporate fluff bullshit I always love reading and then rolling my eyes over.  They’re goalposts!  Eight of them!  Because a football field really has eight goal posts! 

Ironically, this could make the Super Bowl more compelling, if there were really eight goal posts.  Like, instead of the two goal posts at each end zone, they could flank two on each of the sides of both end zones.  And then they can have a taller and slightly further goal post behind the original goal posts.  These could be some trick-shot kicks that have different point values than the standard field goal or extra points.  Like instead of going for 3 on a field goal, aim for one of the side goal posts for 4.  Or the kicker has the leg, go for not just 3 on the regular field goal, try and pass the second goal post in the back-back for a bonus extra 2 points.

This would definitely shake up the dynamic of the game, and I’m sure in the rare event that the San Diego Los Angeles Raiders Rams Chargers made the Super Bowl, I’m sure their Korean kicker* would have a ball trying to Asian math crunch the physics behind trying to optimize his scoring potential from kicking trick shots.

*Did you know there was an active Korean kicker?? Because I sure as fuck didn’t.  I don’t follow the NFL enough, much less the Chargers to have been aware of this.  But goddamn, good for this fellow Korean, who even went to school in Georgia after turning down a ride to JMU.

The end result of this abstract direction is a jagged-looking ball of trash that looks like such, or, Megatron’s butthole.  And then there are these tidbits from the very-necessary press release for this piece of shit’s unveiling:

“The city of Atlanta and obviously the infrastructure is a key part of … bringing a Super Bowl to the community,” he said. “And the stadium … really helped close the deal. 

Infrastructure?  What fucking infrastructure?  If this city had any modicum of infrastructure, it would have gentrified twice over by now, and we’d have property values issues that would rival San Francisco.

And then there’s this:

The host committee’s logo won’t be the only one associated with the 2019 Super Bowl. The NFL will release its own logo for the game early next year. 

So not only is Super Bowl Lee (sounds aZn) getting a shitty logo on the local side of things, the NFL’s version of the SBLEE logo is going to come into existence sometime next year.  So by the time SBLEE actually rolls around, the press junkets are going to be clogged to the gills with like the NFL logo, Megatron’s Butthole, SBLEE logo, AFC logo, NFC logo, the New England Patriots’ logo and whomever comes out of the NFC’s logo, as well as logos for like Mercedes-Benz, Gilette and whatever major corporate sponsors will be involved.

Even people who put together NASCAR cars will look over and say god damn that’s a lot of logos.

The ironic thing is that despite the fact that this logo is all about branding Atlanta, I’m going to assume that the visibility of it is going to be quite minimal.  I’d wager that the primary places I’ll see Megatron’s Butthole will be places like local airports, hotels and tourist sites, and probably very minimally everywhere else.  Despite advertising Atlanta, Atlanta will be the place where nobody’s going to actually see it. 

Great use of money.

Normally, I don’t take the designer’s sides on this, but in this particular instance, I can’t help but feel that because it’s apparent that the SBLEE committee of Atlanta had no idea where they were going, I have to assume that the narrative behind all this was a frustrating process for the designer.  I bet after several rounds of potentially better and less bullshitty concepts were tweaked to death and scrapped, the designer probably looked at one of the balls of crumpled paper at his desk and just drew something abstract out of that.

Voila.  We have another unnecessary and useless logo in the world.

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