Critique: SJI Logos

As a part of our 20/10 assignment, the Sports Journalism Institute is allowing our class to come up with some possibilities for their logo redesign. Greg Bowers, the Sports Editor for the Missourian, has been working the SJI spokesperson and liaison for their transition to the MU campus. He visited our class to present the assignment and came in yesterday when we critiqued our first 20 logo concepts in class. He had some pretty good advice for us to start moving forward and touch up some of our best ideas for the last critique.

One of Greg's biggest concerns was that he didn't see the diversity concept in most of the designs. The whole point of SJI is to tackle the issue of diversity and put more minorities into the newsroom to have the opportunity to succeed at sports journalism, so obviously diversity needs to appear in the logo designs.

I tried to portray diversity through color, but I the feedback I got was that this wasn't as obvious as I had perceived it to be. I didn't want to be so obvious about including it (like, literally a black person and a woman), but it seems to me that Greg maybe wanted to actually see people in the logo. I'm going to try to put a human aspect into it, but I think this is going to be really tough. I would much rather work with color, but I think it will be good for me to try and give a more difficult design idea a shot.

So, here are all the logo ideas I came up with! I don't really know which is my favorite at the moment; I have a few. I wanted to stick with black and white and red as my colors. I tried to use the red as a spot color rather than the dominant color. I thought the black and white represented diversity and the red stuck out to me as reflecting journalism, sports, and the sense of immediacy reporting gives you. I also thought these colors looked classy, but using just a basic red kind of gave the logos that "throwback" feel that Greg described to us in the beginning. What do you all think?