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Popular Culture Review
logos? What influences did the graphic design field have on team logos? What
are the characteristics of the trend toward simplification of football team logos?
Literature Review
Television. Much is written about the historical relationship between
television and football (Cressman & Swenson, 2007; Patton, 1984; Mullen &
Mazzocco, 2000; O’Neil, 1989). A theme recurring in this literature is the idea
that television and football have a symbiotic relationship, as they influence and
transform the other. Whether it is the increased size of letters and numbers on
the players’ uniforms to make them more visible, or game-stopping timeouts for
television commercials (actually called “television timeouts”), football has
evolved to satisfy the visual, auditory, economic, and time-oriented needs of
television. These changes, which include the aesthetic style of the team logos,
are fundamental to the success of both sport franchises and media owners.
Before the television era, football had little concern for things such as closeup images, or wide angles. The only images were those seen on the field of play
and sometimes in still images in print media. Logos, uniforms, and the scene en
scene of the game changed in the late 1950s and 1960s with increased of
television coverage of the sport, new production innovations, and a growing
television audience. For nearly every team that was a franchise before
widespread television broadcasting, a distinctive aesthetic transformation in the
design of the team logo occurred around the decade of the 1960s. According to
George McCaskey, this change was due in part to the contract that the National
Football League signed with the television networks in the 1960s (see
Methodology section for information about George McCaskey). As part of the
contract, the teams were pushed to put logos on the teams’ helmets (G.
McCaskey, personal communication, April 2, 2007). This move made logos
more prominent and helped the television viewing audience easily distinguish
one team from another and contributed to the simplification of the logos. The
quality of the television image may have been an underlying motivation for this.
Marshall McLuhan (1964) said that, “the TV image is of low intensity or
definition, and, therefore, unlike film, it does not afford detailed information
about objects” (p. 317). Precise and finely detailed graphic imagery was,
therefore, not a necessity in the production of early television programming.
“Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium,” he wrote. “The close-up that
in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing. And whereas a
glossy photo the size of the TV screen would show a dozen faces in adequate
detail, a dozen faces on the TV screen are only a blur” (p. 317). Therefore,
televisual graphic design in the 1960s necessitated visual simplicity.
Television viewing was a very different experience in the late 1950s and
1960s than it is today. For example, the image was monochromatic; black,
white, and shades of gray comprised television’s color scheme. Moreover, a
television’s screen size was, on average, smaller than today’s models and home
reception of the television signal was often problematic. Noise factors produced
static that reduced picture quality and influenced how viewers saw the game and