On Monday, Appalachian State University unveiled an official new secondary logo for the school’s athletic department: a disastrous figure that looks like a Simpsons rendering of Abraham Lincoln’s drunken evil twin. Probably drawn in Microsoft Paint, it shows a grumpy, frowny old man smoking a corncob pipe and with a top hat hiding his bald yellow head. This character’s name is “Victory Yosef,” but his face is the picture of defeat.

This character’s name is ‘Victory Yosef,’ but his face is the picture of defeat.

His victory, I suppose, was in usurping the former, perfectly normal “Yosef Head” secondary logo, which was introduced in 1999. (See the school’s primary logo here.) Yosef, the school’s mascot, is a sassy mountaineer. Smiling and looking hopefully toward the future, the old Yosef Head logo was not particularly memorable but at least he projected an air of stoic optimism. According to the school’s giddy announcement of the switch, the Appalachian State community much preferred this new “throwback logo,” which was used last season for a single game as part of a promotional event. It’s based on the logo the school used in the ’70s, which gives it “significant historical meaning,” the school says.





What really happened, we suspect–we don’t know, because the designers did not respond to calls and emails for comment–is that ASU noticed other sports organizations adopting retro branding, and decided to hop on the bandwagon. “Traditional logos with strong mascots are hot in the market right now and we are excited that Appalachian State has chosen to permanently introduce the Victory Yosef logo to its official logo library,” said Lewis Hardy, president and CEO of Licensing Resource Group, Appalachian State’s licensing management partner.

This statement gets at the heart of what’s so strange about Yosef’s makeover: it’s retro merely for the sake of being retro. It’s an attempt to create nostalgia for something that’s not really worth any nostalgia (a common branding mistake). “Remember the good old days when sports logos all looked this shitty?” is all it really says. It’s fetishizing the old school for no discernible purpose.





ASU would probably argue otherwise. “The excitement that Victory Yosef has generated among our students, alumni and fans since we introduced it as a throwback logo last fall has been overwhelming,” Appalachian State director of athletics Charlie Cobb said. “Due to its popularity, it only made sense to make Victory Yosef a permanent part of our branding. We hope that it endures as a recognizable mark of Appalachian athletics for years to come.”

This humbug of a mountaineer looks like he hates mountaineering, sports, and everything else.

On SportsLogos.net, Victory Yosef has a user rating of 3.5 out of 10. In 2012, 7 of their 10 “Worst New Logos” of the year had user ratings higher than that. So what makes it so terrible?