This Concept was part of an ongoing challenge where I redesign every logo of every team in the NBA. For this design in particular, my objective was, to connect the past with the present. I wanted to bring more fierceness and power to their present logo, as it lacked a lot of the fierceness and energy that their logo had in the past.
This image shows my first attempt at sketching out the bear head in procreate. As you can see I didn’t finish the sketch, as I quickly realized, that the bear looked a little bit too realistic and in fact started to become too detailed as well. With the aspect of scalability in mind, I had to start anew and focus more on connecting past and present, instead of leaning too much on the detailed logo they had in the past.
This one shows the final sketch that I used to create the vectorized logo and type for the Memphis Grizzlies. Both, the type and the logo did not end up exactly as the sketch turned out to be, but that is often the case during the creative process, as you see the sketch differently once it has been turned into the vectorized design, but nevertheless did these two sketches provide the perfect foundation for the finished design.
This shows the first vectorized version of the bear. It looked fine for me at first, but a few things were off. With the aspect of reduced details in mind, I knew that the yellow/lightblue basketball was too detailed and might not be easily visible from further away. I also wanted the yellow to be a really powerful color in the design and use it only for the eyes, to make it seem like the bear is directly starring at the person looking at it.
For the purpose of showcasing what I attempted to do, you see here the past and present logo of the Memphis Grizzlies. As you can see, they are very much different from one another. While their logo in the past had an amazing amount of power to it… their present logo kind of lacks a lot of that. While the bear in the logo they had before truly looks fierce and full of fury, the one they have now looks kinda.. I don’t know - grumpy? With the closed muzzle that kind of looks like he is frowning gives the bear more or less the appearance as if he is pouting. I feel like in the process of modernizing their logo, they look so much personality away from it, that it looks far less interesting and engaging than it did in the past. The type in their present logo reflects this as well.
With my redesign, I made an attempt, to establish a visual connection between their logos of past and present. I kept the element of the basketball in the design, while reducing the logo from a whole bear to just the head, allowing me to reduce the details in the design to a great degree. I really wanted to fuse their logos together into one - combining the fierceness and level of detail with the modern look they have now, without alienating the teams logo from its roots which I think their current logo has actually done. The grumpy look on the bear is gone, and he now actually has much more personality with more power and fierceness in his appearance. I also created a secondary mark, that can be used as an additional graphical asset that can be used wherever the primary logo can’t be used, enabling an even better versatile use of a new, consistent logo design.
For the colors, I choose to keep them the same as the team’s colors currently are. If they would use this rebrand, I think it would be strategically smart, to use the same colors their fans have come to know to establish the link between their present logo and the potential new one. This also allows for the visual connections to their past logo to come through without alienating fans from the team. Their fans built a connection to their present logo and to its colors, but are still aware of how the team’s logo looked like in the past and will pick up these elements in the new design very quickly. Changing the colors might’ve made this chance for this quick recognizing much harder.
For the typography I heavily leaned into their past type design, but as its easily seen, I greatly reduced the detail in the new type, but kept the forms of the letters very similar to how they looked in the past. I exchanged the type for the „Memphis“ part for one without an outline as it had in the past. The „Memphis“ in their current design has a similar look to how it looks in my design. This too is no accident, as this also helps with establishing the new design without alienating it from the teams visual history. My attempt to fuse past and present together also extended to the type treatment of this design. So I modernized the „Grizzlies“ type which is reminiscent of their past design, while making the „Memphis“ part very similar to their present design.
