The Marlins’ bizarre new look

The team's revamped logo involves a whimsical rainbow swoosh. The effect is anything but intimidating

By Aaron Kenedi, Imprint

So far the biggest story to come out of baseball’s early off-season isn’t some splashy free agent signing or the abrupt retirement of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, but that of the logo and uniform redesign of the Florida Marlins. The new look was officially announced on Friday, and if you haven’t seen them already, you might not believe your eyes. In fact, when some of the images of the new logo were leaked there was such shock and disbelief by the baseball world, most people assumed it was a farce, calling the look everything from “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” to “Push-up Pop” to “Rainbow Bright.”

The rebrand was planned as part of the team’s big move to their new stadium, New Marlins Ballpark (which also sports a logo with a rainbow motif), a baseball-only park with a retractable roof to keep the tropical rains away. With a name like New Marlins Ballpark, the powers-that-be decided the team needed a new identity as well. So not only are the uniform colors radically different, but the team will now be called the Miami Marlins.

Gone is the teal, silver and black color scheme the team has worn since its inception in 1993 (and in which it won two World Series), and in its place, as you can see, is a curious combination of oranges, yellows, blues and assorted other bright hues. Gone too is the detailed illustration of the eponymous fish, bursting around and through the logo with furious determination. Instead there is now a whimsical suggestion of a marlin swooshing from some unclear source out of the Aztec-influenced M letterform. Whatever its origin, one thing is sure: The overall effect is anything but intimidating.

In addition to the new logo and color scheme, new uniforms will also be revealed. Again, this look isn’t certain to be the one unveiled on Thursday (and in light of all the backlash, it’s entirely possible the Marlins’ design team has gone back to the drawing board) but this is what has been floating around the ether and seems to make sense based on the logo. White home jerseys with black caps. Away grays with a radically out of place blue cap (that strangely echo the original Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms). And some assortment of combinations for Fridays and other games.

Apparently the team’s (and stadium’s) colorful new look is meant to reflect the multicultural heritage of the many diverse ethnic groups living in the area. But you have to wonder if the Marlins’ head honchos learned nothing from the atrocious Houston Astros uniforms of the mid-1970s (known as the “rainbow era”) that made even Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard, at left (two of the era’s most dominating pitchers), look a tad sheepish.

Not to say orange is a bad choice for a sports team (the Giants, Orioles and Tigers pull it off pretty well), but it does require some tasteful design skill and a healthy grasp of workable color palettes.

Perhaps it’s not the worst logo ever (for some ideas on that front click here); there are always the Chicago White Sox shorts and collared unis from the ’80s to claim that distinction. But if this is indeed the look of the new Miami Marlins, my guess is it won’t be around long.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

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A forgotten newspaper adopted the name of a Godzilla monster as it fought imperialism and racism

By Michael Dooley, Imprint

(Credit: Alan Takemoto)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Remember those radical underground rags of the late 1960s? The East Village Other. The Berkeley Barb. The L.A. Free Press. Gidra. Wait … Gidra?

Wasn’t that a monster in those dumb Godzilla movies? Yes, but just because he tried to lay waste to Japan and the rest of civilization, Gidra wasn’t all bad. Which is how five UCLA students felt when they decided to name their newspaper after this three-headed winged dragon from outer space.

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A '60s cookbook hawking Soviet recipes provides a bizarre example of stunted graphic design

By J.J. Sedelmaier, Imprint

Topics:Imprint, Design, Food

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Soon after we started our White Plains, N.Y., animation/design studio in 1990, a neighborhood church opened a special volunteer bookstore three doors down the block on Main Street. People would donate books to the store’s inventory and the church would accept financial donations in exchange for whatever volumes you wished to leave with – you gave whatever you felt was fair and exited with your book(s). At a certain point, it became so popular as the place you could give your old books a good home, that people would back trucks up to the front of the store in the middle of the night and literally dump libraries of tomes at the store’s threshold. If you arrived early enough, you had your pick of the tasty, choice ones and could come to the store after it opened to contribute your donation. Without a doubt, I was able to acquire some very unusual and esoteric books this way. This is also how I came to own two editions (acquired at different times) of a Russian book titled “A Book About Tasty And Healthy Food”.

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The image-sharing site has become the hot new social media tool. Here are the best ways to use it

By Jude Stewart, Imprint

From the author's Should I Buy This? board (Credit: Jude Stewart)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Social media watchers are ablaze lately with the news: Pinterest appears to be THE next hot tool. While Slate’s Farhad Manjoo gave a not-meant-for-me review of the tool (his article title, “Cupcakes, Boots and Shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal,” says it all), Pinterest’s numbers are indeed exploding. The site hit 10 million monthly unique visitors faster than any site ever, and it’s responsible for more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. Clearly those are stats worth paying attention to.

But who should be using Pinterest, and for what exactly? More crucially, how can Pinterest feed the ever-ravenous maw of color and design fandom, whether you lead an entourage for your own work or dig the design work of others? Your primer has arrived …

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is basically online scrapbooking. It’s an invitation-only network, so to get started just ping someone who’s already on Pinterest (like me, joodstew), and they will invite you in.

Once you’re in, simply install a “Pin it!” bookmarklet in your favorite Web browser. From that point on, any time you see a gorgeous photo online, simply click “Pin it!” and a popup window will appear, allowing you to add that photo to one of several photo collections, or “boards,” you maintain on Pinterest.

If you happen to pin an image from a retail site with a price associated with it, your image will also appear in Pinterest’s Gifts section with price listed.

Pinterest operates on a follower-following basis, just like Facebook and Twitter. You can jump-start your Pinterest network by connecting your FB and Twitter user names. That will populate your Pinterest wall with your friends’ pinned images, and show your pins to people who follow you. From there, the acceleration effect kicks in: you can repin images you like, comment on them, or simply “like” them (which doesn’t commit them to any of your boards; it’s sort of a shopping-cart option for images you may or may want to keep permanently).

To stoke your madly pretty collecting urge further, download the Pinterest mobile app and pin during idle minutes via your iPhone or Android phone.

What benefits does Pinterest offer, and to whom?

Pinterest scratches the itch of anyone visually minded who wants to collect evocative images for various purposes and share them with like-minded folks. Put in plain English, here are some of Pinterest’s target audiences and motivations:

Brides gather hairstyle images, shop for flowers, dresses, for their big day — everything they shop for. Brides get monster mileage out of Pinterest, and retailers have definitely noticed.

Moms gather DIY project ideas for kids, promising recipes to try later, clothes they’re shopping for, inspirational quotes of all kinds. This group also fuels a lot of retailer site traffic if they ultimately buy the stuff they’ve collected or shared via Pinterest.

From PoodlePoddle

Interior decorators share beautiful home designs, collect furniture and home-interior products they recommend, assemble and share color palettes for every room in the home. Here’s a one-stop place to stoke their clients with pricey, tantalizing ideas that will hopefully turn into paying projects.

Retailers can use Google Analytics and other site-traffic tools to see which sites are sending them the most traffic in any given month. If Product A is submitted by someone to Pinterest, it may well catch fire with the community, getting pinned and repinned. All those collective eyeballs can simply click back to the original retailer’s site to buy — and many do.

From my Should I Buy This? board

Infographic-makers can submit their thought-provoking graphs to Pinterest and watch the referral traffic (hopefully) roll in. However, as the above indicates, Pinterest skews heavily toward affluent adult women — pictures of killer crankshafts or infographics that don’t speak to this demographic may fizzle with this audience fast.

Why should designers and color fans care?

Pinterest sits at a crossroads right now. It captures the DIY-handmade aesthetic (and associated shopping urge) of Etsy. As its collected images diversify from the merely cutesy, it could become a super-charged version of Flickr.

From fffound.com via Thao Huynh

Most crucially for designers, this is an images-driven social community. In other words, it’s built for your kind to positively dominate. While many of the good moms using Pinterest aren’t clued in to the latest design looks, they are a madly appreciative crowd — if you offer up your gorgeous images, you will be met with copious applause. Anyone posting their portfolio to Behance or Core77 should double up with a little Pinterest test. After all, Pinterest users are well-educated, affluent females who likely wield serious hiring power in between Pinterest coffee breaks.

If you’re selling retail designed goods, pin your products so that site traffic flows back to your preferred retail site. That may be your Etsy storefront or a retail partner. But Pinterest users are definitely, permanently in a shopping mode — and they like buying design-driven stuff.

Question Mark via Christi Harris

In addition to yours truly, here are a few Pinterest boards and people to get you started. (Note: You can follow everything a user pins, or just follow one or several of their boards.)

Amy Nalette / Color
Amanda Pearl Brotman / Color
COLOURLovers
FastCo.Design
Sight Unseen
Design*Sponge
Sha Hwang

Happy pinning to you!

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

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A new book looks at a Cold War-era Polish magazine that deeply influenced the surrealist imagination

By Steven Heller, Imprint

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

In the ’60s, two foreign design magazines were passed around America as though they were underground or samizdat publications. One was Graphis from Switzerland, the other was Projekt from Poland. Let’s focus on the latter. It was a revelation to learn about the artistic intelligence of the Polish poster artists, illustrators and designers. They led the way in surrealistic imagination. A new book, ”Projekt: The Polish Journal of Visual Art and Design” (Unit 05) by Charlotte West and Edgar Bąk, is now available from the indie lads at www.uniteditions.com. I asked the chief lad, Adrian Shaughnessy, to tell us about the heritage of the magazine and his interest in it.

Why a book on Projekt?
We were approached by the design writer (and Print contributor) Charlotte West who has been researching Polish graphic art for some time. In partnership with the graphic designer Edgar Bąk, she proposed a book on Projekt magazine. To my publishing partner Tony Brook and me, it seemed like a great opportunity to publish a book on a little-known subject, and to celebrate the wonderful heritage of Polish graphic art.

Formed in 1955, Projekt was one of the few publications to showcase the art and design of not only work from behind the Iron Curtain, but also of the West. As a satellite state of the Soviet Union, Poland was subject to censorship, and Polish artists and designers were expected to adhere to the official Soviet artform of Social Realism. Charlotte West’s essay describes Projekt’s tortuous history as it struggled to survive against the backdrop of official disapproval, and how it slipped under the Soviet radar to become a platform for some of the most celebrated members of the famous Polish Poster School – among them Henryk Tomaszewski, Józef Mroszczak and Jan Lenica.

Edgar Bąk also contributes a short essay describing how, as a designer growing up in Poland in the 1990s, he was surrounded by what he calls “shoddy” Polish design and “shiny” Western design. It was only when he encountered back issues of Projekt in his university library that he realized that Poland had its own magnificent graphic design heritage. He describes how this discovery grounded him in the visual and graphic traditions of his country.

How long did the magazine publish?
After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, the magazine limped through the 1990s and 2000s. But by then it was a pale reflection of its former self. Its heyday was undoubtedly the 1960s and ’70s, when designers and illustrators fought to be given the privilege of designing or illustrating the front cover. And each issue came with a poster. Danuta Wróblewska, one of Projeckt’s editors, noted: “In almost every single studio in the territory of the USSR, there was a copy of Projekt lying on the table and the poster attached to it hanging on the wall.” She recalls a trip to Japan where she saw Projekt posters in “three different artists’ studios.”

What do we learn from Projekt?
Poland has a long history of rebellion and opposition, and this contrarian spirit can be seen in the pages and covers of Projekt. We also get a glimpse into the Polish graphic design tradition which is every bit as rich as that of Switzerland and Germany, but which unlike the graphic output of those two nations, is too idiosyncratic to travel.

What did you learn?
Embarrassingly for someone who claims to be knowledgeable about graphic design, I wasn’t aware of Projekt until Charlotte and Edgar showed me copies. I was always a fan of the great Polish poster artists, but Projekt introduced me to a few names that were previoulsy unknown to me. And thanks to Charlotte’s essay, I learned something about Polish cultural history.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

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Two Parsons professors discuss their best students' work and their favorite classic color theorists

By Jude Stewart, Imprint

Bezold Effect study (Credit: Liz Marshall)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Welcome back to an ongoing, freewheeling conversation on color with Thomas Bosket and Langdon Graves, who both teach color theory at Parsons the New School for Design. (Read part 1 to catch up.)

Do you have any knockout students in your color theory classes right now?

Thomas Bosket: I haven’t taught color this past year, so here are some students from previous years: one work by Liz Marshall exhibited the Bezold effect and the economic use of color. [Ed note: the Bezold effect is an optical illusion in which two colors, juxtaposed in small doses, distort the impression of each color’s shade, just by proximity to another hue.] The other, by Stephanie Luk, offers a redesign of Parsons’ very narrow hallways.

Bezold Effect study by Liz Marshall

Colour of Space assignment for Parsons’ narrow hallways, by Stephanie Luk

Langdon Graves: I had a terrific class last fall because of how dedicated the students were. Early each semester, I assign a Creative Color Chart — a spin on the traditional color wheel — for which the students create their own progressive designs featuring 12 hues, tints and shades. One student, Christine Gurtler, designed a chart inspired by the grid of a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan:

That’s all acrylic paint and paper. Obviously, she went beyond 12.

Two semesters ago I gave the assignment to design an infographic to represent a personal experience, using color in a significant way. A student named Vaishnavi Mahendran charted the progression of her taste in music and fashion from childhood to adulthood, assigning an increasingly darker, more sophisticated hue of pink to each phase of her life (interrupted by an amusing black/metal phase). It’s such a clever and attractive design, I love sharing it:

Detail from infographic by Vaishnavi Mahendran

Lightning-round: Whom would you rather have as a roomie on a desert island, Josef Albers or Johannes Itten? [Note: both men are Bauhaus artists noted for their contributions to “classic” color theory.]

From Homage to the Square color-interaction series, by Josef Albers

TB: Itten. He was trying to understand color and contextualize it. Albers feels too esoteric (in an uninteresting and exclusive manner — we have history, Albers and I … grad school!) and his work has been turned into “rules,” no fault of his, but I could just see hours and hours of argument about the color of the sunsets.

Horizontal Vertical, by Johannes Itten

LG: I know I should say Itten because he was such a master and without him, we certainly wouldn’t have as much to learn from Albers. But I think I would choose Albers because of how much he attributed his appreciation for color to his experiences with his students.

This is how I continue to learn about color, myself: by interacting with other people and learning as much from them as they do from me. I also like the thought of sitting around on a desert island with Albers, creating simultaneous contrast collages of found mango leaves.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

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