It’s apparently “Wings Week” on Defector.com, and long-time sportswriter and general curmudgeon Ray Ratto posted an article suggesting that the Red Wings’ “Winged Wheel” should be hailed.
This one requires a subscription to Defector to read, but it’s a free subscription:
It’s a wing, attached to a wheel, and needs no elaboration. It is evocative, simple elegance that does not task one’s patience the way this does, make you think the designer stopped for lunch and never returned, or annoy the entire concept of the sport.
It starts with the wing, which is celebrating three quarters of a century as the most perfect logo in all of logodom. Not because it represents the Detroit Red Wings, mind you. Nobody but Comrade Theisen cares about them one way or another, and she cares about them with an unsettling fervor.
No, it’s the logo—the idea, simply and perfectly delivered so well that it has held up with only subatomic modifications since 1948. It doesn’t need any words to explain what, where or why it is, like this. It doesn’t have an angry cartoon character, like this. It isn’t changing every three weeks from something terrible and lazy to something lazy and terrible, like this. It has no socially unsettling antecedents, like this. It doesn’t even try to anthropomorphize itself, like this.
Mostly, though, the Red Wing is perfect because it stays constant. Most teams submit to a rebrand every few years because the owner’s cousin’s kid took a drawing class in junior college and wants to justify it. Some teams, most of the minor league baseball teams, change their entire name to fool folks into thinking they are wacky, fun-loving, out-of-the-box thinkers rather than the borderline plagiarists they often are.
And a few teams have tried to recreate/reinvent the wing with indifferent success.
But all those logo designs are falling out of fashion, and not just because repetition is the weakest form of flattery, or because of the silent scrutiny of the winged wheel.
Continued; we’ll see what else Defector.com cooks up for “Wings Week.”
