Impetus: Vanderbilt changes their logo to their athletic department; impresses nobody

A long time ago I saw some quote that I never really committed to memory, but the gist of it is something that always stuck with me.  It went something along the lines of, there’s few better ways to hide mediocrity than stashing it behind a new logo and branding.

When it comes to college athletics, Vanderbilt is pretty mediocre.  They suck at football, they suck at basketball, and they’re occasionally good at baseball, but college baseball has a level of parity that most other sports wish they had, so it’s not really saying that much.  What doesn’t help is that Vandy is part of the SEC which is obviously the biggest football conference in the country, and they’re also not that terrible at basketball either.  So they’re mediocre at just about everything, but also in one of the most competitive athletic conferences out there.

But as far as logos are concerned, I had to give it to Vandy’s old logo, for standing out.  Sure it was just a letter V inside of a silhouette of a star, but there really weren’t many other teams or identities out there that were similar.  No interlocking letters, no script fonts, no abstract bullshit, just a letter V inside of a star.  They came before the Houston Astros rebranded, so they had a lock on that concept first too.

It wasn’t my favorite logo out there, but it was identifiable, and one of the more noteworthy things about Vanderbilt athletics in general.

But then for whatever reason, they decided to change it up, and in a horrific, downgrading manner.  They basically have turned into a generic high school logo, with their plain old V, with some instances of it having a thick stroke, and others having a slight bevel in the center.

It reminds me of playing a video game where someone makes their own team in an established league, but custom teams only have a selection of generic letters to choose from, so someone made the Valdosta or Vinci, and they have this boring looking V on the marquee going up against the Chicago Bulls.

The link above has a lot of the initial greatest hits of internet snark and armchair comedians sharing their takes on the new logo, and there’s really not much else that I can add to it, plus I’m too lazy to write stupidly long-drawn out posts anymore.

What really spurned me to post something at all, was the claims that this new logo was two years in the making, and came after extensive research:

Updates on the Vanderbilt identity come after extensive input from across the community, with more than 500 completed surveys, 70-plus one-on-one interviews and dozens of workshops and group engagement sessions conducted during the past two years.

Yeah, that’s all bullshit.  Either Vandy is lying about how it really took two minutes to come up with such an unoriginal and boring concept, or this is a textbook example of overthinking and overplanning something into oblivion.  By adding as many cooks into the kitchen as 500 surveys and 70+ interviews and workshops and focus groups, every person who thinks they’re an artist or a designer chips more and more away at something with potential, until it turns into this new Vanderbilt V logo.  I do a lot of surveys; I’m a Senior Manager of IT for a Fortune 50 company if it helps me get $1.58, I’m sure I’d be a fan of a boring generic V too if the price were right.

When the day is over, it doesn’t really fucking matter and is more something for me to write about, being the logo and design snob I can be.  Vanderbilt is kind of the definition of mediocrity, but now they have the perfect logo to help visually exemplify their position in the collegiate ranks.