Rethinking Louisville’s soccer brand

What would it take to keep Louisville City FC’s brand from committing another red card offense?

Soccer fans have seen this before.

The city’s team enters a new league, breaks affiliation with a franchise or exchanges ownership. The team needs a bold visual statement to reflect the fresh start.

The owners unveil a new brand and it flops. Badly.

It fails to capture the character of the city and the hearts of the supporters (and they will let you know). The criticism comes as a shock at first, but the owners conveniently have an epiphany: they are not the only stakeholders in the team. To make amends, the owners perform a public expression of humility and invite the team’s supporters to be part of the redesign process.

That is where Louisville City FC finds itself today: they unveiled a new identity, everyone hates it and they’re starting over.

Louisville City FC crest by Doe-Anderson Inc.

There are a lot of things wrong with the new identity. I am going to focus on three things and offer solutions to each: the name, the color and the crest.

I know these are difficult design challenges and I am confident people worked hard to create tenable solutions. Appeasing fans and looking good is not an easy task. That said, Louisville City FC could have avoided this misstep.