Columbus Crew finally ready for a redesign

That will soon change, and it’s about time.

The Crew moniker was chosen as the result of a fan contest in the Columbus Dispatch all the way back in 1994. After thousands of submissions, MLS chose the name for the new MLS club. The logo was designed by the then-Global Creative Director at adidas, the same man who created the instantly-recognizable “three bar” logo for the sportswear giant after leaving Nike, having launched the original Air Jordan and the famous ball and wing logo for the brand. It is pretty incredible that the man who came up with two of the world’s most iconic logos also came up with what the Crew have been using for almost the last two decades.

The crest is a shield with sharp corners at five points and slightly-curved lines connecting them. The top band is yellow and contain’s the Crew’s name in an all-caps and bold Copperplate Gothic font face. Under the club’s name is a trio of black-and-white figures in hard hats that aim to embody teamwork and the idea of the Crew being “America’s Hardest Working Team,” which is also the club’s slogan.

Yellow, black, silver and white are the three colors that make the logo. While the yellow, black and white are not really offensive at all, the gray is a boring and unimaginative shade that borders on cool in terms of temperature, not sex appeal, and does little to help the crest’s cause.

The design as a whole is decidedly stuck in the ‘90s due to its inherent complexity. A thick black stroke surrounds the design, encasing the individual elements and giving them only a few pixels here or there to breathe. This is particularly true of the word “the” at the peak of the crest and of the two construction workers that flank the main man in the center. To stop their hard hats from hitting the border, the designer was forced to cut a pair of notches in the thick black outline, which only goes to mess up what little continuity the crest had.

The three hard-hatted figures look like something out of a very early Photoshop demo video on how not to use the levels tool. The shading is jagged and features thin, extraneous pixels in both black and white that add to the unrefined look. The left-sided figure is perhaps the best example of this with a seemingly random dot on the man’s left cheek. Additionally, the gray background serves as too much of a middle ground between the extremes of the figures and everything gets a bit lost in translation.

The Crew’s current logo simply has not kept up with the times and much like the crest that the New England Revolution are sporting, it is more reminiscent of the Dallas Burn and San Jose Clash era than it is of Major League Soccer’s current generation of teams, their big-name players, and the rise in popularity of the league itself.

There are a variety of ways in which the logo can be improved and while Crew owner Anthony Precourt is on record saying that “there’s a retro aspect to [sic] current crest we like,” the indication is clear that the team and its fans are open to change.

With a new logo set to be unveiled in early October per an official release from the Crew, the branding could go a number of different ways. If the event invitation email is anything to go by, the club’s colors will stay the same with yellow, black and silver featured heavily in the design. The other design element of note is the heavy use of diamonds as the background, a motif used in this season’s home kit.

In truth, the various elements on the Crew’s current crest are not bad as an idea. It is their execution both individually and as a whole that sees the club’s current identity lacking any kind of wow factor in terms of style. The Crew name should be big, bold, and strong and the construction crew means well, but neither one of those puzzle pieces looks anywhere near modern in their current iterations.