How to Design Baseball Logos
A well designed logo lasts forever. Logo designer Paul Rand created the ABC television network logo in 1961. The elegant design, a black circle with the network's call letters in white, lower case, sans serif font, has never been modified. The same design principles that make Rand's logo great can help today's designers create great baseball logos. Choosing the right colors and graphic elements will help you create enduring baseball logos.
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Instructions
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Research the baseball team. The geography of the team's location and the personality of its mascot can inspire the design of its baseball logo. The skyline and bridge in the New York Mets' logo, the mountains in the Colorado Rockies' logo and the wave in the San Diego Padres' logo all evoke a sense of local pride as well as team pride. Similarly, the Miami Dolphin, the Detroit Tiger and the Pittsburgh Pirate designs imply menace and aggression. Baseball logo designers should find a way to include the team's home state, city or neighborhood and personality in its logo.
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Select no more than two colors for your logo -- three colors if one color is black or white. Strong commercial logo designs, like ABC, Coca-Cola and FedEx, use one or two bold colors. The same is true of the baseball logo portfolio. The Detroit Tigers, the New York Yankees and the Chicago Black Sox use a single-color design. The Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, Cleveland Indians and Major League Baseball use red, white and blue.
Logo colors should have high contrast. The San Francisco Giants, Detroit Tigers and Pittsburgh Pirates contrast bright orange and yellow design elements with dark colors like blue and black.
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Draw one or two baseball logos, one simple and one slightly more complex. Combine your team's letters with graphics that represent the team's mascot or venue, or with graphic designs from baseball such as bats, balls and diamonds. Repeat elements from the simple design in the complex design.
Align the elements of your design so they relate to one another. Anchor text and graphics to a baseline or center point.
Many baseball teams place a simple logo like a single letter on the front of their baseball caps and use a more complex logo that includes the name of the team's city or state on uniforms and marketing materials. Good logos use simple lines. It's hard to think of busy, cluttered commercial logos because famous brands either chose a simple logo in the first place, like ABC, or redesigned busy logos to make them simpler. The Arizona Diamondbacks, the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Mets use a lot of design elements in their logos, but all three teams also have a cleaner version of their logos.
A baseball team logo has to look good on both an Internet banner ad and a giant banner in the stadium. It has to be legible on both a business card and a team uniform. Consider all the media in which your baseball logo will appear as you execute your design.
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Tips & Warnings
Draw inspiration from other organization's logos, but don't copy them. Nearly all existing baseball logos are protected by trademark and copyright registrations.
References
- Photo Credit baseball field image by Dave from Fotolia.com
