Logo Integrity

A recent trip to Escondido, and specifically to the Bistro of the Stone Brewery, gave us a hint of how to properly brand one's company. The integrity of the logo, if you will.

For Stone, like their most famous beer's logo, they use a gargoyle. The Arrogant Bastard gargoyle is changed a bit for the entire company, and here we see it on the menu:

Ignore the stinky cheese, I guess. We actually had that plate, now that I think of it. Only one cheese was particularly stinky.

Then, see the logo having been carved onto a light fixture:

Instead of holding a plate with stuff, it's holding a beer. Sweet.

Then, see it again on the wall in a large relief sculpture:

Branding and logo integrity, two things I haven't really touched on here so much, this being usually more about how the symbols were created or how they effect the populace they represent. But integrity of look is important.

Cool Fictitious Flags

These following flags represent some of my favorites, but they're all fake.

They are all fake.

They represent fictitious municipalities, or are from real places but are fictitious banners.

The first is one of my favorites, and is from the Simpsons. "Disparaging the boot is a bootable offense!"

This next flag is from the television show "The Big Bang Theory", and represents the two main characters' apartment. I think it looks pretty cool, the walking lion on the powder blue field.

I guess this is supposed to be for Bikini Bottom, the town where Spongebob Squarepants lives and works. I've seen a few episodes, and can't place it.

The next two are both from the same episode, the first episode from Season 4 of the Simpsons, and represent a before and after situation:

This flag I remember from the episode in which it appeared. It was an episode where South Park explores a current event at the time, namely old city and state flags that have images that are insulting or prejudice to a segment of the populace. See if you can figure it out:

Here's Springfield's flag:

And especially for my internet nerd buddies, Strongbadia:

Some More Interlocking Baseball Logo Action

I grabbed a few more interlocking baseball logos, and I've got them listed by when they first really appeared.

The first is the Mets, a team that was created in 1962, but they use the old New York Giants' "NY", which predates the Yankees.

Another icon that showed up in this final form shortly after the Giants "NY" is the "StL" for the ST. Louis Cardinals.

Next is the iconic "LS" for the Dodgers. This particular design was from the local PCL Angel team that was displaced.

The Giants themselves have a pretty nice "SF", but they didn't lift the logo from the Seals team in the PCL.

An old design used on and off for many years (and solidly for the past twenty), the White Sox actually have the team nickname spelled out in interlocking letters. I remember in school kids would use a Sharpie and blot out one of the white lines of the "O" to make the cap say "Sex" instead of "Sox".

The Twins from Minneapolis/St. Paul. Minneapolis had the Millers (an "M") and St. Paul had the Saints (and an "StP") so what do you use to keep everybody happy? Well, a "TC" for "Twin Cities".

An expansion team in San Diego, the Padres just took the name from the original PCL team stationed there (uh...the Padres). Their "SD" is a little less blocky than the Giants' "SF".

And the newest team on the list or the Rockies. They have an odd one, having their region and their nickname represented on the logo--Colorado Rockies.

Missing? Kansas City and Tampa Bay, mainly because their barely crossing and aren't interlocking/overlaid. I'll be working with them later, along with the Chiefs from the NFL, as one of the few interlocking football logos.

Three Flag Groups: Related? You be the Judge

First I have a pair of flags that have differing canton scenes, but because of their color scheme and regional proximity I lumped them together, just so I could see them together. The first is the Central American country of Panama:

Next is the Dominican Republic, with the odd negative space creating color-checked cantons:

Now the next two are both from the Caribbean, are both island nations, and are both associated with the Dutch. Their designs are quite similar. They both have a star(s) in the canton, and use blue for the sea and sky and gold for the sand.

First up is Aruba. The four-point star is a rarity in flag design, and this star has a complex set of things it represents. I won't go through all of them, just the one I find most interesting. The soil on the island is red, and the beaches are, for the most part, white sand, and of course the ocean is blue, so one of the symbols it represents is the island itself, complete with beaches and surrounded by sea.

This next flag is Curacao, and it was the winner of a contest. The island nation was granted the ability to design a flag after Aruba chose their own. There probably had been some kind of influence from the Aruba design bleed over.

Now, in the title of this post I make the statement, or rather imply, that the groups are related. What I meant was that each group was related to itself to some degree, but not to the others.

Well, what really happened, was that I was getting a few too many flag post ideas, and then smashed three together into one long(ish) post. The main reason, aside from having lots of ideas, is that there just wasn't enough stuff with each of these sets to really talk about without too much Wikipedia plagiarism.

This next set are the three famous vertical Tribands of Europe.

The first is France, which had a profound design influence over all subsequent tri-color tribands:

The next is Ireland, where the white is for peace and the colors represent the two main religions on the island: green for the Catholics and orange for the Protestants:

The last to show up temporally was Italy's green red and white. Funny thing about this flag is that because of the late unification of the country and adoption of this flag, Italy has to get the thumbs-up from Mexico for certain variants. Seriously. The nation of Italy has to check with Mexico if they want to do something special for a parade or inauguration.

Mexico's flag is older, and they've laid claim to many variations without their centered national seal, which is pretty much Italy's flag.

Is This From a Beer Bottle?

When I saw this logo, I immediately thought it was taken off an early '90s bottle of Budweiser's Bud Ice, when it was first released.

This minor league hockey team chose oddly. After a few hours roving the Internet I couldn't find the the specific Bud Ice logo that I was certain corresponded with this. I'm starting to think it was all part of my imagination.

Is it just me? Doesn't this look just like a '90s era malt liquor beverage?

Red Plus Signs: St. George's Cross

I suppose the Swiss flag is more of a white plus sign.

So, like the cross of St. Andrew, the white "X" on the blue background, the English have used a single cross for their flag, but not the "X", rather a "+", that is red on a white field, otherwise called the cross of St. George, the patron saint of England.

We've seen that flag before, with the building the UK flag post.

Now, St. George can be the patron saint of more than one place, and has lent his name as well to the next country: Georgia:

The small central Asian country has a few claims to fame, one being that they're the spot on the planet where wine was first fermented from grapes (many, many years before there was an idea of "Georgia"), and another being that they were the first kingdom to claim Christianity as their state religion, before the Romans had converted.

Georgia, today, to distinguish themselves from England, has added four smaller St. George crosses, onein each canton.

Two NFL Logos that Haunt Me

The NFL has some logos that I consider some of the best ever. This is odd, as I'm first a baseball fan, and a fucking Yankee fan at that. So, who knows.

But, besides the electricity bolt (ingenious, San Diego), the fleur de lis (yes, francophones in Nawlins'), and the five-point star (from the despised Cowboys), there are two more logos from the NFL that I just can't get enough of, philosophically anyway.

The first is the Seahawk, from the team from the Pacific Northwest in Seattle.

Reason: damn, this is designed from, or inspired by, the totems and other indigenous images produced from the peoples from the area. I can't think of any other professional team in any other sport that actually use a design from a native people. I wouldn't be surprised if there others, but I can't think of them right now.

Now the next one I think may just be a product of my imagination. It takes a little imagination and an open mind to see this my way, but if you're open for it, this next logo may be one of the philosophically coolest ever.

It's the Buffalo Bills blue buffalo and red line.

I always figured that the line was reminiscent of a spear, that it was actually supposed to be a spear.

If that is a spear, then what would could have inspired this? For me, this logo always derived from a cave painting.

A logo based on an Ice Age era image, one of the oldest images produced by humans.

How could any other logos be as cool as that?

Non-rectilinear Flags: Nepal and Ohio

There are only two flags that are official and represent major entities, like a nation or a US state, that are non-rectilinear, that is, not a quadrilateral, not a rectangle.

I did find that a province of a small island nation is non-rectilinear, but I'll be damned if I could find it again.

The first is the nation of Nepal. Carved out of the Himalayas, touching both India and Tibet, Nepal has nearly thirty-million residents, which must be pretty dense, considering it's between Iowa and Illinois in terms of size. 

The two triangles are special math triangles, the top a 30-60-90 edition and the bottom is an isosceles right triangle. In the top triangle is the symbol of the sun and the moon, and the bottom is the sun. The color scheme is used other times surrounding China--in the north Mongolia uses it, and in the south east both Lao and Cambodia use it. I believe that China itself used it before the revolution (see post about the canton).

Nepal size places it ahead of our next flag, that of Ohio, the only other major non-rectilinear flag. I always thought it looked pretty cool.

With almost twelve-million residents, Ohio has less than Nepal, but is still ranked 7th in the US, and 10th in population density.

Carolina Panthers Make it Easy for Me

The Carolina Panthers were an expansion team from 1995 when, along with the Jacksonville Jaguars, professional football added a pair of teams to the under-served south.

The Panthers brought teal to the NFL, and oddly the Jags' helmets resembled the Panthers to some degree.

This season the Panthers changed their look, but only slightly. It wasn't really enough for me to mention, had someone else not put together this graphic:

That's from one of my main sources for logos, sportslogos.net. The original is on top, strangely enough labeled "OLD" and the updated one underneath, labeled "NEW". Funny how that works. They took away some of the panther's facial depth, but gave him an angrier look.

They seem to be making these changes all over the various pro leagues, the "make the animal angrier, and italicized it", like you can italicize animals...I think that's the best description--italicizing the animal, just not so much here with the Panthers.

A black and teal roaring Panther sounds pretty original, but it turned out that the spring football pro league, the USFL, had a team called the Michigan Panthers, and here's their logo:

The USFL was a big-time pro football league that existed for only three seasons during the early '80s, and they played in the spring and summer, not the fall and winter. They drafted three consecutive Heisman trophy winners at a time when the NFL was boring it's fans and had a hard time selling the networks its product.

Once Donald Trump got involved, and tried to shift the league to a fall league, competing against the NFL directly, the whole thing unraveled, and it was lost. One of the most exciting pro football playoff games I've ever heard about was a shootout between Steve Young and Jim Kelly, two Hall of Fame QBs, but it was in the USFL. Jim Kelly through for more than 500 yards and 5 touchdowns to complete the comeback.

Building the United Kingdom Flag

It seemed like it was time to get this post going. I was going to do a St. George's cross post, but that'll wait. This post had been eating at me.

Okay, so there is a country called England, there is an island called Great Britain, there are two major islands that, along with a few small ones, comprise the British Isles, and there are four countries that make up the United Kingdom. Those countries are England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

England and Wales worked out some kind of agreement, because the Welsh flag is conspicuously missing from this collage.

So...as we've seen earlier, here's Scotland:

And here's England:

Once the union was fully realized between Scotland and England, they combined their flags: it looks like they cut the red cross of St. George from the English flag--with a bit of bordered white--and stitched it onto the Scottish flag.

This is the Union Jack:

When the Union loosened their grip on Ireland, most of the Protestants moved to the north, and a collection of counties stayed loyal to the crown and wanted in on the union. To modify the flag once again, they decided to use the cross of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland as the piece to add:

And it can be seen in the white saltire below, giving us the current flag of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland:

Apparently, the religious community is very strict about which saints' crosses are allowed to be used for national flags, and how those saints were killed is the main thing. St. Andrew and St. George are okay, but not St. Patrick nor St. David, which I'll post in a second.

I mentioned earlier that the Welsh flag is sorely missing in the collage. Well, how would you work it in:

The next is the flag of the cross of St. David, which the Welsh also consider a nationalistic image. It seems like it might be better suited for the Great Collage, but it'd still be a challenge:

(It must look a little odd here.)

Not too many other flags were built like this over time.

French Connection Soccer Logo

I once wrote a piece about the French Connection, both the movie and the cartel it was based upon. 

Recapping: the film was about American cops fighting the influx of heroin into New York by way of something called the "French Connection". This connection was a guy who based his operations in Marseilles, a large port city on the Mediterranean Sea. From there he was able to get heroin from Turkey and French Indochina to him, and then able to send it out to the states.

I have not been to Marseilles besides rocketing through on a train, but those French Riviera cities are similar in attitude if different in scale. The following logo is for the Marseilles soccer team, the team that, like the "U" in Miami or the Mets, both during the '80s, flourished in the shadows of great drug consumption or organizational proximity.

The club's officially known as Olympique de Marseilles, which basically means the Marseilles Olympians, and they have a long and rich history. They are the only French team to win the UEFA Championship League, and, with nine Ligue 1 championships (the highest French league), they're one behind having the most ever. They could be the most decorated French club ever. They also have some blemishes, like price fixing and demotion scandals, all the great things you expect to see with big money flowing.

Droit au but means "straight to the point".

Similarities in Central America

The flags of the majority of Central American nations can be traced to this, the Argentinian flag:

The powder blue was adopted, and modified a little, but the design ethos was shared by the region as a whole, and the flag of Honduras, seen here, retains as close to the original as still exists. The horizontal blue-whit-blue triband is still there, and the five stars represent the five original Central American countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. Here's Honduras:

Next we have Guatemala. Guatemala as a name and an idea predates all of the other Central American countries, as the Spanish name for their holdings south of Mexico and north of South America was called the Guatemalan Captaincy (in English). In any case, to stand out, they put their triband vertically, and added their nation's seal to the center:

The next two are very similar, only separated by their coats of arms. The first is El Salvador:

And here's Nicaragua:

I've shown the flag for Costa Rica already, and have a plan coming up for Panama's. Panama was a part of Simon Bolivar's Colombian empire, and was later in fighting for and gaining independence. Belize has been left out as well, and maybe that'll be reason enough later to show it. Time will tell.

Black and Gold Define Pittsburgh

Few cities have such a color designation as Pittsburgh. The identity of the Western Pennsylvania steel and coal town has bled itself from those two industries. Those colors, of course, are black and gold. The black (coal and iron ore) brings the gold (wealth from the mining and foundries).

I've decided to go with the Jerseys for the main teams, mostly because they show the black and gold the best considering the background color of this blog (black--see the Belgium post for perception difficulties).

The first is the oldest and currently longest suffering team, the major league baseball franchise, the Pirates:

The caps are black with a gold "P", and the home outfits are white--like all home kits in baseball--but the letters and numbers are black with gold trim.

The colors come through with a little more authority with the city's NFL team, the Steelers:

The home jerseys rock the black shirt and gold pants, and haven't really changed in thirty or forty years.

The Steelers have been one of the most respected and well run teams in American sports, despite their dirty rapist quarterback.

Another successful team in Pittsburgh is their hockey franchise, the Penguins:

The Pens have one of the most exciting players, Sidney Crosby, deliverer of the Hockey Gold Medal in Vancouver (the only medal that really any Canadian gave two shits about), even though they haven't won the Stanley Cup for a while. Their gold has been toned down recently, but it still counts.

Next up is the major sporting university, Pitt. Better known for their Big East basketball, here's the Pitt football helmet:

Now, if you have a keen eye, you can see that they don't use black, they actually use navy blue and gold, but
the similarities aren't accidental.

Well, to drive home the point, here's the flag for the city of Pittsburgh. It'll probably look a little weird with the black background, but it's a vertical triband (black-gold-black) with the Pitt's, the city's namesake, family crest centered:

The black and gold even found it's way onto their arena football team, the Power:

The abundance of Scottish folks working the mines led many historians to conjecture that the original pronunciation, or at least how it was pronounced by the people living there, was "Pitts-burra", like Edinburgh being pronounced "Edin-burra". At some point, though, it switched to what it is today.