Once upon a time Hanesport – Hanes’ dedicated sportswear division – and MacGregor – golf specialists and generalists in every other piece of sports paraphernalia – had nearly identical logos. The Hanesport example comes from a 1967 crew-neck sweater tag, while the MacGregor mark was lifted off a multi-generational baseball uniform spot from 1955 – 12 years earlier. Even so, I’m willing to bet they co-existed at some point and now I wonder who laid claim to the original. Yes I could do more research.
I found out that French’s Mustard red flag predates both of these examples so what’s really going on with this? I had no idea this was a convention that was so ubiquitous. Like a custom script, the red flag is fair game!
Even though it’s not unique to the sports world over, would you believe the A’s have the most unique color scheme in Major League Baseball? They are the only team without a blue, black, or red in their official palette. I will be committing further analysis to this puzzling phenomenon in posts to come. It’s (only slightly) outrageous!
Another mark with an icon treatment. I like the flow of these swashes and I finally landed on an ‘R’ I’m happy with after a few pages of scribble. Sadly, some of these do take a few pages.
Lately I’ve been adding little symbols outside the word itself. I’m not sure if I want to keep that going – it gets tricky (Giants?). Works ok here though.
I’ve never been much of a graffiti writer. I did however half-assedly practice many hand styles on enough book jackets to notice the influence whenever I have a chisel tip pen in hand. This practice combined with my more technical attempts at lettering mish-mash into a sometimes ugly, sometimes fluid wordmark. But I love the little freaks.
I eventually lose all pens that are practical for writing anything legible so frequently I’m forced to use highlighters and red ink to facilitate my sporadic sketching impulses. Because a neon-yellow on white can be nearly imperceptible, I started tracing the contours to get a better look at what I was sketching. I started to like the stroked forms.
Aside from that, I suppose I never grew out of writing team names. Thus, Neons.
