Even if you don’t like sports, there are many sports logos with which you may be familiar. But here’s the thing: even if you DO like sports -- even if you instantly recognize a myriad of logos and create the semiotic link in your head to the team they represent on a daily basis -- they’re insanely hard to recreate from memory alone.
Draw a sports logo from memory: Houston Astros
Drawing a sports logo from memory is harder than it sounds. See how well we did and try it for yourself.
Bill Hanstock is a writer, author and Emmy Award-winning producer. He began writing for SB Nation in 2011.
This is our ongoing series where we attempt to recreate these logos using only a drawing implement and our own all-too-fallible human memories. Please enjoy our horrible attempt at the logo and accompanying anecdote, then give it a shot for yourself in the comments below. Have fun!
The Houston Astros are kind of bad. Don't know whether you'd heard. They've been kind of bad for a while. Their most notable achievement of the past few seasons is that their second baseman is shorter than you might expect. That's it. That's what they've got going for them.
This year, the Astros moved to the American League, where they figure to get stomped even more than they did in the National League. They're going to spend the next few years being a footrest for the Seattle Mariners. But they got new uniforms this year! That's sort of neat!
Since their new logo is sort of easy to draw, I also wanted to draw their last primary logo, which was super SUPER awesome when they first adopted it, because they went from being “crummy team with bad uniforms” to being “neat team with Bagwell and Biggio and later Clemens and Kent and whoever that one guy was who hit that 18th-inning walk-off home run or whatever in the playoffs.”* But by the time they switched up their uniforms again, the logo and its accompanying brick-red softball-top jerseys were as awful as the rest of their uniforms. The Astros uniforms were the Astros of baseball uniforms, if you will.
So here’s what I came up with! Give it a whirl for yourself! Old logo on the left, new logo on the right.
I don’t think the old logo is supposed to look vaguely like a sharp butt in the middle, but maybe I’m wrong!
* They didn’t adopt that as their actual slogan, but only because it didn’t fit on the sleeve patch.
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