wo1fwood Profile Blog Joined December 2010 3347 Posts Last Edited: 2015-01-09 12:28:33 #1





Communication

Take TeamLiquid for example. As much as I like liquid, we don't really have a great strategy from which to communicate with other organizations our branding. Considering the situation:



partner: "Hey, we need your logo for some promotional material?"

liquid: "the TL logo?"

partner: "yea, could you send it our way?"

liquid(internally): "hey guys, does someone have the TL logo, we need it for something!"

some graphics person rummages around for the thing



There's something inherently inefficient with the handling of this situation and is where ESL has been a shining example of how to handle these kinds of requests. They, like most established businesses have developed a style guide, usage guideline or a press kit for their branding and have a way on the web to get it without anyone having to contact them. (esl gaming's logo can be found



It's this kind of strategy that makes me like ESL even more than I already do, because as a news organization, covering them is very easy. Blizzard also deserves special note here, as they have an extensive press kit section on their site that includes assets from many of their properties, and are all easily accessible. WCS could use some work though...





What Assets are you Providing

You'll also note that I mentioned pngs previously and not jpgs. The reason is that png's obviously allow for background transparency. Unfortunately with jpg, or the occasion where someone made the background white in a png (yes this happens) someone then has to spend extra time masking the background out just to get a decent looking image. This assumes you have more than a 300x300px image to work with. Another of the biggest problems with esports logos in that even when you can get the logo, it's often times low resolution, or highly pixilated, or on a background that would make using it either impossible, or a lot more work.



In fact to combat this problem I rebuilt many esports organization logos for TL as vector graphics just so our department or the site had prettier and easier things to work with. Yes I know that this makes the logo's not technically "official", but between using or rebuilding, I'll take the later. Scary enough, the list of things I've redone have included images from the following organizations: valve, dreamhack, mlg, ongamenet, sktelecom, gsl, gom, kespa, proleague, osl, spotv, axiom, invasion, samsung galaxy, prime, hypergloryteam, titan, d2l, g-league, starladder, fragbite, weplay, homestory cup, wec, and zotac.



I should note that I might have been able to easily contact some of these organizations to get their original logo (axiom comes to mind), but a google search should be able to land me where I need to get to 99% of the time. Also, I should note that valve is 'kind' of a special case as I have personally reached out to them but have never been able to get in contact. If only they had a press section on their site... (hint hint)





Flexibility

The final piece in why most esports logos are poorly handled is that many organizations aren't thinking about how the logo is going to be used when they design it. Is it going to be on merchandise? In print? What kind of print? On the web? On the side of a car? To illustrate, here's a few example cases, but first:





Branding Primer

Before I talk about this, a few terms so we're on the same page:

A Logo is the complete package, which can be only one of or include all of the following:



Icon: The graphic thing (Nike Swoosh, Apple's Apple, Liquid Horse)



Wordmark: The text is the logo (Kellogs, Blizzard, Valve)



Monogram: Usually a graphic that incorporates a truncated portion of the company name (General Electric's GE, GSL, EG, EA)





As an example TL's logo is a combination of an icon (horse) and a wordmark (text). These can be arranged in essentially 4 configurations, as the icon only, wordmark only, icon next to wordmark, and the icon above wordmark. This is what our internal guidelines say we should stick to, and generally that's a pretty standard way to do it. Ok, case studies!





Case 1: Complexity's Complexity



Ok, so I'm not a fan of this logo for a bunch of reasons. The first is probably that the embedded C-G of the background swooshes (complexity gaming, or ClG when top left to bottom right viewed (whoops, did you catch the clarity problem?)) seem overly squashed, and thus the whole logo feels overly constrained. It's also a bit too visually busy for my tastes as the C+G seems to be lost in the fray of the icon and the wordmark. Finally, the wordmark is hard to pick out even at this size, so in order to combat this Complexity slightly retooled the text adding a thicker black border to the logo so it stood out more with more depth. That's not fixing it guys...







Ok, so what about where it's going to be used though? Well what if you wanted to embroider the logo onto a hoodie, or jacket? Due to the overlap of the icon and wordmark and the shapes/angles being used that'd be prohibitably expensive, so forget the chance of that ever happening. Ok, so what about printing it instead? Well now we have to talk about the size a little. What if the printing is going to be 50cm wide (~2")? The icon might be ok, but the wordmark will get completely lost in the business of the design and it's size. So we could do that but we'd be sacrificing its recognizability a bit, which is not really ideal.





Case 2: DK and Blob Syndrome



Whoah, you're picking on DK's logo? Well yes. DK's logo is a combination of an icon and a monogram (dragon knight in the bg, DK foreground), with a wordmark below. To say nothing of the typeface (which doesn't fit in the slightest), the main issue with DK is not recognizability, it in fact excels at that (though the icon portion is pretty overly complex and obscured). What is problematic is when you start to re-orient the logo, all of the complexity that is in the design gets completely lost after a certain point. As an example, here's dk's logo as a 16px wide, and 16px tall image:





is that DK?



The problem as you'll note is that the logo is very inflexible and becomes unintelligible at those sizes, 16px tall is about the very edge of recognizability, but that already is far too large for many web standard usages.



This highlights the last major point about logo designs that are generally inflexible. Your logo might look ok at 64px, or at 200, but what about as a 16x16 favicon, on a pin, or on a pen, or on a billboard? Perhaps a thunderstick? What about a keycap? I'm sorry to say that here is where DK doesn't really perform well as the smaller it gets (distance from our eyes too), the more it's shape distorts and becomes a blob of grey and red. I shouldn't be too hard however because a great many esports logos fall prey to this inflexibility issue, but it is a problem that apparently people are not thinking about.





Case 3: Kespa...



No, I'm not even going to go into details... The above logo is really terrible, don't ever do this. ^^



Edit: ok, someone asked me to explain, so I did on page 2.





Case 4: Virtus Pro



See that polar bear? He's sneering at your bad logos and proclaiming to the world that he is a force to be reckoned with. It's a bit of hyperbole but I should be praising the person who created this logo. It uses space effectively, has a clear and shape with good proportions that doesn't distort as it scales, and its color scheme is a clear identifier. This is a great example of good logo design in esports (minus the weird pathing issues in a few places that they should fix). I will mention that as I don't speak Russian I can't figure if they a press section on their site, but I can still get their logo from a google search.



Edit: fuse to the rescue





Recap, and Research

Disregarding the elephant in the room when talking about logo design (the artistic acumen required) here's a recap of 3 things I've talked about in this blog that would greatly help in order for esports branding to really grow: Have logos available on your website, with usage guidelines

Provide logo's in their original format as transparent png's (a 300x300 image is not enough), psds, or vectors (p.s. in a few years time there's zero excuse to not have a svg of your logo available)

Understanding how your logo is going to be used, where, and dealing with that in your design process

That would at least get us to a place where people can access and share stuff about your organization without it being a visual chore or relying on liquipedia (lol) so that they'd be shared in as many ways as possible.



If you want to learn more about branding and get ideas, Under Consideration's Ever since treehugger published his blog on esports logos , I've been meaning to add to the discussion of esports branding and why a lot of it - to be frank - really sucks. It isn't so much that I like or dislike logos of various organizations (i'll get to this in a sec), but perhaps more that most organizations are pretty awful in how they approach their branding. There are three major parts to effectively handling your brand. The first one is communication.Take TeamLiquid for example. As much as I like liquid, we don't really have a great strategy from which to communicate with other organizations our branding. Considering the situation:partner: "Hey, we need your logo for some promotional material?"liquid: "the TL logo?"partner: "yea, could you send it our way?"liquid(internally): "hey guys, does someone have the TL logo, we need it for something!"There's something inherently inefficient with the handling of this situation and is where ESL has been a shining example of how to handle these kinds of requests. They, like most established businesses have developed a style guide, usage guideline or a press kit for their branding and have a way on the web to get it without anyone having to contact them. (esl gaming's logo can be found Here ). What's more, when you unpack the archive you'll not only get an array of pngs, and the original vector, but note a jpg that shows you ESL's usage guidelines, or a press kit so that you have an idea on how they want you to use their logo, and ways that they have said that you should not (colors, orientations, etc...). Not all organizations do this second part, but many do (every university that I have worked for ALL have this).It's this kind of strategy that makes me like ESL even more than I already do, because as a news organization, covering them is very easy. Blizzard also deserves special note here, as they have an extensive press kit section on their site that includes assets from many of their properties, and are all easily accessible. WCS could use some work though...You'll also note that I mentioned pngs previously and not jpgs. The reason is that png's obviously allow for background transparency. Unfortunately with jpg, or the occasion where someone made the background white in a png (yes this happens) someone then has to spend extra time masking the background out just to get a decent looking image. This assumes you have more than a 300x300px image to work with. Another of the biggest problems with esports logos in that even when you can get the logo, it's often times low resolution, or highly pixilated, or on a background that would make using it either impossible, or a lot more work.In fact to combat this problem I rebuilt many esports organization logos for TL as vector graphics just so our department or the site had prettier and easier things to work with. Yes I know that this makes the logo's not technically "official", but between using or rebuilding, I'll take the later. Scary enough, the list of things I've redone have included images from the following organizations: valve, dreamhack, mlg, ongamenet, sktelecom, gsl, gom, kespa, proleague, osl, spotv, axiom, invasion, samsung galaxy, prime, hypergloryteam, titan, d2l, g-league, starladder, fragbite, weplay, homestory cup, wec, and zotac.I should note that I might have been able to easily contact some of these organizations to get their original logo (axiom comes to mind), but a google search should be able to land me where I need to get to 99% of the time. Also, I should note that valve is 'kind' of a special case as I have personally reached out to them but have never been able to get in contact. If only they had a press section on their site... (hint hint)The final piece in why most esports logos are poorly handled is that many organizations aren't thinking about how the logo is going to be used when they design it. Is it going to be on merchandise? In print? What kind of print? On the web? On the side of a car? To illustrate, here's a few example cases, but first:Before I talk about this, a few terms so we're on the same page:As an example TL's logo is a combination of an icon (horse) and a wordmark (text). These can be arranged in essentially 4 configurations, as the icon only, wordmark only, icon next to wordmark, and the icon above wordmark. This is what our internal guidelines say we should stick to, and generally that's a pretty standard way to do it. Ok, case studies!Ok, so I'm not a fan of this logo for a bunch of reasons. The first is probably that the embedded C-G of the background swooshes (complexity gaming, or ClG when top left to bottom right viewed (whoops, did you catch the clarity problem?)) seem overly squashed, and thus the whole logo feels overly constrained. It's also a bit too visually busy for my tastes as the C+G seems to be lost in the fray of the icon and the wordmark. Finally, the wordmark is hard to pick out even at this size, so in order to combat this Complexity slightly retooled the text adding a thicker black border to the logo so it stood out more with more depth. That's not fixing it guys...Ok, so what about where it's going to be used though? Well what if you wanted to embroider the logo onto a hoodie, or jacket? Due to the overlap of the icon and wordmark and the shapes/angles being used that'd be prohibitably expensive, so forget the chance of that ever happening. Ok, so what about printing it instead? Well now we have to talk about the size a little. What if the printing is going to be 50cm wide (~2")? The icon might be ok, but the wordmark will get completely lost in the business of the design and it's size. So we could do that but we'd be sacrificing its recognizability a bit, which is not really ideal.Whoah, you're picking on DK's logo? Well yes. DK's logo is a combination of an icon and a monogram (dragon knight in the bg, DK foreground), with a wordmark below. To say nothing of the typeface (which doesn't fit in the slightest), the main issue with DK is not recognizability, it in fact excels at that (though the icon portion is pretty overly complex and obscured). What is problematic is when you start to re-orient the logo, all of the complexity that is in the design gets completely lost after a certain point. As an example, here's dk's logo as a 16px wide, and 16px tall image:The problem as you'll note is that the logo is very inflexible and becomes unintelligible at those sizes, 16px tall is about the very edge of recognizability, but that already is far too large for many web standard usages.This highlights the last major point about logo designs that are generally inflexible. Your logo might look ok at 64px, or at 200, but what about as a 16x16 favicon, on a pin, or on a pen, or on a billboard? Perhaps a thunderstick? What about a keycap? I'm sorry to say that here is where DK doesn't really perform well as the smaller it gets (distance from our eyes too), the more it's shape distorts and becomes a blob of grey and red. I shouldn't be too hard however because a great many esports logos fall prey to this inflexibility issue, but it is a problem that apparently people are not thinking about.No, I'm not even going to go into details... The above logo is really terrible, don't ever do this. ^^Edit: ok, someone asked me to explain, so I did on page 2.See that polar bear? He's sneering at your bad logos and proclaiming to the world that he is a force to be reckoned with. It's a bit of hyperbole but Ibe praising the person who created this logo. It uses space effectively, has a clear and shape with good proportions that doesn't distort as it scales, and its color scheme is a clear identifier. This is a great example of good logo design in esports (minus the weird pathing issues in a few places that they should fix). I will mention that as I don't speak Russian I can't figure if they a press section on their site, but I can still get their logo from a google search.Edit: fuse to the rescue http://virtus.pro/info/about/brandbook/ Disregarding the elephant in the room when talking about logo design (the artistic acumen required) here's a recap of 3 things I've talked about in this blog that would greatly help in order for esports branding to really grow:That would at least get us to a place where people can access and share stuff about your organization without it being a visual chore or relying on liquipedia (lol) so that they'd be shared in as many ways as possible.If you want to learn more about branding and get ideas, Under Consideration's Brand New Is an excellent resource. Really. Also coincidentally they have a link to sports logos right now: http://news.sportslogos.net/2014/12/30/best-worst-new-logos-of-2014-sportslogos-net-readers-choice-awards/ . It also happens to be a great repository for sports logos.



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