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Popular Culture Review
communication, April 2, 2007). The history of this enigmatic part of the NFL
seems, for the most part, lost. However, with little deviation, our study shows
that most football logos have evolved into simpler designs at approximately the
same time—a time that happened to coincide with the technological
requirements of television in the 1960s.
This is not to say, however, that the football team management intentionally
changed things because they saw that a simpler logo would work better on
television, or that they were in tune with the graphics revolution of that era.
Rather, we argue that the change may have been a result of a generalized trend
of thought and feeling during the timeframe under examination, a Zeitgeist, if
you will, that marked this era. In other words, though there may not have been a
conscious series of decisions made to change a team’s logo due to television’s
technical needs (though some decision makers in football could have been savvy
enough to understand this), the changes occurred nonetheless because of an
instinctive understanding of what was visually appropriate and what would work
for the television medium.
A series of factors may have converged around the time of the late-1950s
and on through the 1960s, helping to bring about the clear pattern of logo design
simplification. First, it was around this time that teams started putting logos on
their helmets at the behest of the NFL (note that not all primary logos are helmet
logos). So logos were designed to fit on a helmet. It is also true that a football
helmet fits nicely into a close-up image within the television frame. This may
have led to greater scrutiny of the logo design from team owners, NFL
administrators, and fans. This is speculative reasoning because there is no
documentation of this process anywhere. Even email and phone messages to
football team headquarters yielded no information about the ways in which the
team’s logos evolved (except for the Chicago Bears’ George McCaskey).
The power of symbolic representation and the need to display such a potent
visual identifier may also have played a role. Regardless, the debate about
television as a mode of artistic representation and its ability to bring about
change in other artistic forms like the changes in logo design shown in this study
goes on. Our findings demonstrate that this question has implications for sports
broadcasters and demonstrates the usefulness of aesthetic methods for
understanding at least some small part of the human condition and for clarifying
something unusual in the seemingly mundane.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Lawrence Mullen, Anthony Ferri,
and Gregory A. Borchard
Notes
1 Though each team’s logo was examined, permission to depict the logos was obtained
from only three teams: the Detroit Lions, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Steelers. To
see the other teams’ logos, we suggest you go to Chris Creamer’s Sportslogos website
mentioned above. And since this publication can not reproduce color, the website