Critique - week 7

As promised, this week's critique is devoted to my rough drafts for the Sports Journalism Institute logo commission. SJI is a program committed to bringing greater gender and ethnic diversity to sports desks across the U.S., and they need a logo. In creating the logos, I tried to address the iconography of sports journalism. SJI as it was explained to me is focused on magazine/newspaper/online sports journalism rather than broadcast, which unfortunately eliminated much of what we visually associate with sports journalism. (The sideline reporter looking skyward with the logo-clad microphone as he or she interviews a 7'4" center, for example)

Here are the five finalists that I picked along with the help of all the designers and our liaison with SJI, Columbia Missourian Sports Editor Greg Bowers.

Obviously, they all require a lot of improvement. These are just rough drafts to better visualize the ideas I was playing with. I like the first and fourth the most (the first is based on the St. Louis Cardinals logo with birds perched on a baseball bat), and the fourth calls upon the podium where athletes and coaches address the media after a game or during a press conference. The last one looks pretty atrocious right now, but I like the idea. It is intended to show a scorecard from a sporting event (specifically baseball, although there are probably ways to incorporate other sports' scorecards), which is a method used to record data about a sporting event. At its most basic level, this is what sports reporting is, even though it can and frequently does reach much greater heights.

Moving forward, I have to find a way to make the fifth one look less cheap and simplify logos one, two and four. The third one is pretty boring, but it does address the idea that this is a program for college students as it is similar to many college logos. I will have to make it more apparent that it's a logo for the Sports Journalism Institute rather than anything that could be SJI (San Jose Institute, perhaps). I don't know that it's necessarily obvious that I should add color, but I certainly will. After all, these logos are not just for letterhead.

When he critiqued all the logos, Greg mentioned that he was disappointed that very few directly addressed the organization's main purpose, which is to diversify sports departments. This is certainly something I thought about, but it's extremely difficult to express this idea as an icon or with color and have it not be offensive. In my revisions, I will make a point to look at organizations devoted to promoting diversity to see how they address such a delicate subject.