The NBA logo is an institution all of its own. For the majority of fans, the striking white silhouette of ‘Logoman’
In 1968, a designer named Jerry Dior spent an afternoon with some marker pens and came up with a classic. Not the NBA logo though – Dior was in fact responsible for the iconic redesign of the logo for Major League Baseball.It’s a devilishly simple and effective design. Consisting entirely of all-American red, white and blue, Dior’s MLB logo uses negative space to carve a silhouette of a batter at the precise moment before his swing. Dior’s supervisor at the time, a branding guru named Alan Siegel, recalled in an interview with NPR that they took the design to the heads of the baseball committee for approval, and received it more or less instantly.J. Walter Kennedy, commissioner of the NBA at the time, took one look at this striking redesign and decided he wanted the same for his league. He went to the source, and enlisted the help of Alan Siegel, who had actually been an accomplished basketball player in high school, though had made the decision to study at Cornell rather than pursuing the sport any further. According to Siegel, the NBA "was having a lot of trouble with their reputation at that time", and Kennedy felt that associating the league with the popular, all-American MLB might help give it a bit of an uplift.Siegel had no plans to mess with what had already worked – a white silhouette on a red and blue background would do just fine. The challenge was going to be finding the silhouette. So, Siegel got in touch with his good friend d**k Schaap, the editor of Sport Magazine, and asked to dig through his photo files. After looking through countless images of various NBA players in all kinds of poses, Siegel came across an image of shooting guard Jerry West playing with the Lakers, captured by photographer Wen Roberts."I was attracted to it because it was nice and vertical, and it had him leaning and dribbling … had a little motion to it," Siegel later recalled. ‘I looked at some logos where there were hands up around the net and the ball. I looked at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s hook shot. I looked at Wilt Chamberlain, Tom Havlicek, Tom Gola and a few others that I remember. The one with West just really worked."Though not everyone is. Jerry West, the player behind the silhouette, has made no secret of his reluctance to be associated with the logo, and has expressed a wish that the NBA would change it. "I wish that had never gotten out that I'm the logo," he said in an interview. "I really do... I don't like to do anything to call attention to myself."The NBA have long agreed, and indeed have historically been very reluctant to acknowledge that the logo is West – in official material he was and still is often referred to as ‘Logoman’, despite practically every basketball fan and their mother knowing who he is. Siegel once recalled being on vacation and bumping into David Stern, who was commissioner for the NBA from 1984 to 2014, and Stern making it clear that he did not feel West should be officially acknowledged as the basis for the logo.The reasoning behind this lack of forthrightness from the NBA has never been clear. Perhaps they were afraid of potential copyright issues. Or, as Siegel has speculated, they were worried that Jerry West might ask for a payout – though his behaviour in the years since is enough to indicate that he almost certainly wouldn’t. But regardless of some of the stranger points in its history, the NBA logo is an unquestioned classic. It helped catapult the league to the dominant status it enjoys today, and the fact that it has barely been changed more than fifty years since its inception makes it a textbook example of why you don’t mess with perfection.It took 48 years for the NBA to feel the need to change a single thing about Siegel’s logo. In 2017, the League announced that it would be conducting a minor refresh of the logo across all its channels – and we really do mean minor.The core of the logo remained exactly the same – with West’s silhouette front and centre. The typeface for the letters ‘NBA’ underwent a minor change, being transposed into a "modified version of Action font, customised for the league".
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