My friends were split right down the middle on Colts vs. Saints, but I think we can all agree that the NFL’s plans to keep the new Superbowl logo the same year after year will deny generations to come the ability to say, “Shiny VAG Rounded and a Reflection? What were they thinking?”

Some of my favorites of yesteryear, complete with accompanying snark, below.

1966. The first Superbowl wasn’t a Superbowl at all. Very sporting of us to hold a “world championship” for a game only played in one country. Still, I can’t imagine how such a logo was approved during Don Draper’s 1960s.

1970. This one looks like The Future, or what The Future must have looked like in 1970 back when flying cars seemed right around the corner. The curved multiple lines are very IBM.

1974. A typographically interesting specimen; the curvy “X” is most unexpected and vaguely feminine for the manliest manfest in sports. It reminds me of a yearbook or a Carpenters album cover. I bet the designer got canned that year.

1975. But the very next year, something just as fonty. That’s the legendary Friz Quadrata, by the way, none to the masses as “the Law & Order font”. Also, back in 1975 the letter “X” must not have been as incredibly badaXX as it is nowadays or it would appear bolder. Or maybe the standards for what qualifies as “bold” have changed.

1981. This one just screams Wrath of Khan to me. No?

It’s worth noting that the slab-serif-plus-bezel style of the Roman numerals would be hard to shake for the next few decades.

1995. Peculiarly southwestern. Yes, it was in Arizona but I have to assume that—tame as the Mid-Nineties were—it was a deliberate decision not to play up the XXX theme. I could imagine a logo adorned with neon mudflap girls going over with the Nascar crowd.

2008. What are the chances this just so happens to so closely resemble the Obama logo of that same year? Why didn’t I notice that the first time?

You can see all of the old Superbowl logos here. What’s your favorite?

Although inspired by Vigilante Design years ago, I had doubts. Could design really succeed without knowing how the client measures success? It felt too much like spec work. If I hadn’t stumbled into trying and failing to aid someone in incorporating Fair Trade into their buying habits, I probably would’ve left well enough alone.

To be clear: Transfair USA has not asked me to do a redesign of their logo, nor has my fianceé—who works for them—expressed any displeasure in the logo.

By the age of 6, my mother had trained me to look for the upside-down Spidey in the corner of comic books. If he wasn’t there, I couldn’t buy the comic. Decades later, I discovered that Spidey did not represent any actual certification scheme, just a way to keep me away from Punisher, G.I. Joe, or anything with guns. In the big picture of changing buyer behavior, the logo is less important than value propositions, availability, or even habit, but that doesn’t excuse us as designers for not doing what we can to help consumers recall, recognize, and recommend the Fair Trade Certified label.

The problem to be solved

A good logo needs distinct shape and character. It doesn’t have to tell the whole story of your brand, just serve as a conceptual container for what the brand may ultimately deliver. The Nike logo doesn’t mention shoes (smart since they’ve moved far beyond shoes) but the checkmark does evoke accomplishment. Similarly, the Apple logo doesn’t mention computers but a bite from the forbidden fruit well conveys their iconoclasm.

As for shape, the current Fair Trade Certified label may not hold up to the Nikes or Apples of the world but still has a lot going for it. When we consider imagery associated with fairness, justice, or equality the first that springs to mind is the scales, closely followed by an “equals” sign. Both are embedded, although understated.

Accentuated instead is the laborer’s half-white, half-black aspect, a juxtaposition I assume is meant to represent race? A single-color silhouette (either black or white) would represent humanity in its totality, but a two-color makes the contrast undeniable. Before I understood Fair Trade as a concept, I thought this meant that trade between different nations should be without deficits. Ignoring the symbolic confusion, it also confuses the overall shape.

The globe underlines the global nature of cocoa from Ghana ending up in Switzerland or sugar from Paraguay ending up in the United States. It may offer a typical consumer some insight into supply chains (“my food comes from somewhere?”) but it seems redundant for consumers already looking to buy Fair Trade. Regardless, it confuses the overall shape just like the bi-racial protagonist.

As for character, the lines are thin, mostly straight, and the grid of the globe has a technical feel to it. While the main figure has a noble posture, his or her lanky build doesn’t impart happy or healthy.

Constraints & considerations

Let’s not do this in a vacuum, eh? We’ll first download the label usage guidelinesand learn the flexibility the label requires. Next, let’s take a look at the existing landscape of certification logos.

Transfair USA certifies a lot of different products, but coffee remains what they’re best known for. The ooviest of grooviest coffee-makers will “triple certify” their beans. “Triple” means Fair Trade, Organic, and Shade Grown (typically certified through Rainforest Alliance). Unfortunately, not every coffee-maker falls into this oovy-groovy (OG) category and many certify with only one scheme. A consumer in a hurry, despite wanting to do right by both his or her own family and the family growing their food, might be content with coffee certified by somebody, even if it’s not Fair Trade. This (quite tragically!) introduces competition among schemes.

The Rainforest Alliance logo is fun, interesting, and easy to recommend (I could’ve just told my mom to look for the frog). The USDA Organic logo, while a little boring, is easy to recognize. Unfortunately, when we’re actually shopping, the labels of certification schemes that a product carries—not to mention nutritional information, ingredients, or even weight or volume—are tiny and hard-to-read.

Here are those same logos at half the size and blurred to simulate our quickly scanning a shelf of products. The frog, like his real-life counterparts, disappears into a mass of green. We’re left with two colored circles and a black & white rectangle. Fair Trade Certified wins this round; in fact, a “black & white rectangle” is what I actually scan for when shopping for Fair Trade…

Unless I’m in Europe. Fairtrade has a different logo everywhere else in the world. The United States decided to be different (surprised?). The minimalist in me really, really wants to just recommend the U.S. adopt the global brand.

Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly great logo. Nice colors, but in terms of shape it’s meant to convey either a laborer with fist in the air, a dead bird skull (ONCE YOU SEE IT YOU CAN’T UNSEE IT), or… uh… I dunno, maybe a coastal highway during a solar eclipse? Anyway, I’m unimpressed.

Chiseling away inessentials

Bruce Lee, in describing logo design:

The extraordinary aspect of [logo design] lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way; the closer to the true way of [logo design], the less wastage of expression there is.

In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions.

Okay, so he’s talking about martial arts and not logo design but the same principles hold.

The parts of the current Fair Trade Certified label that work are the colors (black and white stands out) and the vague association with the scales of justice. The parts that don’t are the bi-racial aspect of the main figure and the confusing background. Let’s keep the good and drop the bad.

We immediately increase legibility in the small and fuzzy version versus the original. It still retains its shape as both a human figure and a set of scales. The character is round and friendly, the buckets break the border—suggesting abundance and generosity.

Without a client to require additional constraints and considerations, I have to admit this process feels empty. Excellence comes from the dance of wild intuition and callous evaluation. What do you think? A successful redesign or no forward motion? Does it accidentally resemble anything?

Step 1: Finding a name.

This part didn’t involve me. My co-worker Levana had already canvassed the multitudinous youth groups that we work with at various trainings, gatherings, and presentations. The name RYSE, possibly but not necessarily an acronym for RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth, rose to the top (no pun intended). Kids liked it, despite—or perhaps due to—its deliberate misspelling.

Step 2: Crafting a brand.

The next step was to gather adjectives that would describe the kind of identity that we wished to create for RYSE. Since it’s a youth network (as in high school age), a lot of the RAN staff excused themselves from this step, leaving the younger members to generate the list. The list of adjectives for the logo ended up being a good mix of useful (doodleable, authentic, upward movement) and generic (hip, cool, smooth).

Step 3: Casting a wide net.

The design process now on my plate, it seemed right to start with a brainstorm. Based on the list of adjectives I received, I put together these twelve designs. Having just read “The Wisdom of Crowds” on my holiday train ride, I was very wary of the process turning into a consensus-based design by committee, turning the logo to poop.

Step 4: Raising the bar.

Instead of circling up and talking through our opinions, the team was asked to vote on their three favorites without mutual consultation. The idea was that the least inspired logos would quietly drop out of the race. That’s indeed what happened, and we ended up with these. There were still too many to send to our youth groups, so next was a quick “embarrassment vote” to remove the ones we didn’t even want the youth to consider.

Step 5: Getting feedback.

Now we were down to five designs, which we felt were good enough to send back to our youth allies for consideration. We asked for both word associations (so we could match them to our list) and Favorite/Least Favorite votes from them. Though the voting for Favorite showed a dead tie across all the logos, the word associations we got back were priceless. “Skyward” and “empowering” were used to describe one, while another just received “weak”. The silver bullet was the feedback that one of our activists would, “totally wear a t-shirt with that one on it.”

Step 6: Closing in.

This next step involved tweaking the design chosen from the feedback through multiple variations to see if there were other treatments that we preferred. Some people had asked beforehand if we could see this one like this or that one like that, but I kept punting the tweaking until after we had gotten a little closer to a decision—no sense in making multiple versions of a bad logo, especially when we’re crunched for time.

Step 7: The devil’s in the details.

Everyone was pretty sure that we had found our logo at this point and all that remained was the tweaking, fitting, squishing, and squeezing of what I considering a rough “scribble”, albeit digital, into the “final” version. Sending these details around for a final vote, most of the comments were in the family of, “they all look great” or “those are very small differences, any are fine”. Only a few people actually kept voting this far into the process.

Step 8: The new RYSE logo.

I took the final logo and did all the technical things in Illustrator to make it feel more “final”, like stroking borders, expanding appearances, and simplifying paths. The vectors went from about 1300 points of complex paths to about 300 points of much simpler paths—stripped for export if you will. Then I had a little fun exploring what it might look like in a two-color piece and made the birth announcement to the team. We had a new logo.

The whole process took just about two weeks, not including the casual conversations and market research that led to the name in the first place. I’m quite pleased with the logo, especially that we managed to include so many voices—like the youth we’ve been working with (it’s their logo, after all)—while keeping the process from slipping into groupthink and lowest-common-denominatorism. Bravo, my inner Creative Director.