Eight logos that suck

On any given day, you probably see more than a thousand logos, whether you consciously notice them or not.  The food you eat, the car you drive, the computer you use, the clothes you wear, the magazine you read — they’re all covered with logos.  And that’s all before you even look at the Internet or your television.

We’re immersed in a logo-rich environment, which makes it all the more baffling how major organizations and companies can have awful logos as their visual symbol.  It’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples out there for good logos.

Here are eight well known logos that bug the hell out of me:

Amazon.com.  I actually like Amazon’s primary logo. It’s kind of cool – “Amazon,” with a swooshy arrow going from the A to the Z.  So I get it: I can get everything from A to Z at Amazon.com.  And it kinda looks like a smile, which makes me happy when I buy something.  But my beef with Amazon’s logo is the abbreviated, swooshy-arrow logo they put on the side of any box you get from them:

Without the words, it’s just a huge, curved phallic symbol on the side of a box. Not so good. Once you notice that, it’s hard to look at a box from Amazon and not be a little freaked out.

American Lung Association. The American Lung Association does fine and noble work, existing to promote lung health and fight lung disease. But why the outdated, religious-looking logo? I suppose it has to do with tradition. The ALA was founded in 1904, primarily to fight tuberculosis. It adopted the Cross of Lorraine as its symbol, representing their "crusade" against tuberculosis. In 1904, I’m sure this symbol may have had wider appeal and meaning at the time, but that was 103 years ago. Their logo predates radio, television, and the Internet. Most people still had horses instead of cars when someone sketched out this logo, and he probably drew it with a quill feather pen in a log cabin, lit by a beeswax candle.

Today, if you look at their logo, it suggests that the organization is a Christian group, not one of the leading nonprofits in the fight against cancer. It’s a bigger, more influential group than it was at the turn of the last century. And just as it changed its name in from the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis to the American Lung Association, it makes perfect sense to change the logo to suit modern times.

The Buffalo Bills. Poor Bills fans: not only did they have to suffer through four Superbowl defeats in a row, but they now have to live with Dick Jauron as their head coach.  Worse still, they’re stuck with this stupid logo.

Seriously, what gives?  It’s a big blue buffalo, but there’s also some huge red laser beam coming out of its head. Or wait, did someone impale the buffalo with a huge red spear?  Perhaps this buffalo is already dead, and the logo is a top-down view of it’s carcass, spiked through the skull by red javelin? Come to think of it, that’s not really a bad visual metaphor for the state of Bill franchise. However you interpret the Bills logo, it’s not exactly an inspiring symbol for one of the NFL’s worst franchises.

The Cleveland Browns.  Let’s stick with the NFL for a moment.  As bad as the Bill’s logo is, at least someone made an effort at some point and decided to add the big red laser beam to the side of the buffalo.  They tried to create something. But what’s Cleveland’s excuse for this?

Their logo is a plain orange helmet. Correction, it’s not a logo, so much as it is an illustration of the Cleveland Browns actual helmet. Not even an effort to stylize a “C” or “B”.  Hell, they could have put a drawing of an angry-looking Jim Brown on the side of the helmet and it would be an improvement.  But no, it’s just a football helmet. And it’s orange.

Now if they put the image of the helmet/logo on the actual helmet, now THAT would be cool. It would be like one of those picture-in-a-picture that’s in a picture-that’s-in-a-picture illusions. Something like that might utterly confuse and distract an opponent. But it’s the lack of this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that had made the Browns one of the most pathetic teams in NFL history.

Radio Shack.  It’s bad enough you’re a technology store, supposedly promoting the newest, hottest gadgets and tech products. Yet you’re still saddled with the strange name “Radio Shack.”

Hmmm. Let’s unpack that a bit. Nobody really buys radios anymore and a shack isn’t the kind of place you’d go for the latest in high-tech gadgetry. So your brand name doesn’t suport your product or corporate identity. Ok, so maybe your logo can help express your modern, cutting edge hipness? Maybe not. Your logo is just thick, slabby letters with a red “R” to the right in a circle. Nothing that conveys sophistication, new ideas, or forward-thinking products. Ideally, Radio Shack would rethink it’s entire corporate identity, but barring that, they could at least re-work their logo to convey a better sense of cutting-edge, hip technology, rather than the place you go to get a power adapter

Toshiba.  Let’s stick with technology companies. Toshiba puts itself out to the world as a "world leader in high technology products." They make everything from computers to DVD players to high-def televisions. They boast more than 8000 employees in America alone. And yet, just look at that logo. It looks like an industrial warning sign. Here’s a company fighting for marketshare with Apple, Sony, and Dell, and their branding looks like it was left to someone with five minutes and Arial Black? If you’re trying to sell comsumers on the notion that you’re an innovator of high technology, it might help if your logo didn’t look like something worked up during the Nixon Administration.

Washington Wizards. I’m not going ot get into the sordid history of how the Washington Bullets became the Washington Wizards (ridiculously rigged contest), or even how the beloved mascot "Hoops" was replaced by the forgettable G-Wiz (an injustice I’ll never forgive), but the logo is probably the worst aspect of the Bullets/Wizards re-branding in 1995. It’s busy, complex, and it doesn’t make much sense. The "wizard" appears to be wind-surfing on a crescent-shaped basketball while clearly palming the ball — turnover, Washington. Meanwhile, he’s zapping himself in the head with some magical spell that’s shooting out of his right hand.

Northwestern. It saddens me to put the logo of my undergraduate alma mater on this list, but I have no choice. Just look at that thing. It’s been nearly two decades since I first stepped on the beautiful campus of Northwestern, and that logo looked cheesy and outdated then. And mind you, I was wearing pegged jeans, kung-fu shoes, and poofy over-moussed ’80s hair at the time. Styles change. The Northwestern logo is the design equivalent of a skinny leather tie or a oversized neon-yellow sweatshirt.

For some reason, the school won’t acknowledge that the goofy, space-age, blocky-modern “N” was never a very good concept to begin with. It looks like typeface that someone at Epcot Center would have picked to convey the “fantastic world of tomorrow.”

And then there’s the matter of the angry, four-fanged wildcat who appears to be upset and suffering due to the fact that it got its neck stuck in the bottom part of the N. It’s been at least two decades, and still, no animal contol specialist has come to help him get out of that thing. Quite cruel, and quite sad.