ALBANY ATHLETICS
A baseball team’s new mark gets an “A” for scoring high points with fans.
Designers: Brock Behme & Josh Butler
Travel 75 miles west of Albany and you run into
Cooperstown, N.Y., home of The National Baseball
Hall of Fame—so it’s no wonder the area takes its
ball seriously. Says general manager Joe Altieri of the
Albany Athletics, a collegiate summer baseball team,
“We’re a nonprofit. We’ve had success on the field;
we’re the only team to win seven state championships
in our division. But the logo we have is not dynamic
enough; it’s dated and too flat.”
Altieri hopes a new logo will improve recognition
of the brand and marketing materials. The new
identity must incorporate the colors scarlet, black
and white. And the mark must work on uniforms,
hats, stationery and the website. To help recruitment,
it also has to be something young prospective players
would be proud to wear.
Designers Brock Behme and Josh Butler worked
up marks for the team. Behme’s designs (figure 3) feature stitches to allude to baseball. Both
designs are strong marks, and the one with two As
back-to-back has an old-school Yankees feel that may
resonate with New Yorkers. But it was Butler’s design
(shown in figure 2) that should help the Athletics fill
their roster and the stands.
“With this logo, I decided to use stylistic elements
that I thought were important: a sans serif
typeface and an interaction between the graphic and
typeface,” says Butler. He says the mark, a capital A
set in Script MT Bold, “needed a complementary
face. I chose Gill Sans Condensed, which is easily
readable, and in my opinion, one of the most versatile
sans serif typefaces.”
Butler decided to add depth to his design by
adding a shadow to the baseball. But he didn’t find
the solution right off the bat. “I did four variations
with the front-to-back arrangement of the ball to
create the effect that I wanted,” Butler explains, “and
eventually settled on the one I did because a) it didn’t
obstruct the letter A and b) it added the depth I was
looking for.”
