Las Vegas Lights Logo Nominees

Last week I shared some thoughts on the team naming process. Overall, I thought it was a solid choice.

Now, we're all here waiting for the ownership group to go through the logo proposals. I'm assuming they are going to do the same community vote thing - but they may just decide to go ahead and choose one directly.  I know they have been posting a few of the proposals on Twitter to get some feedback from fans. Let's take a look at a few of the proposals:



The Sign

I found this one on Reddit. This one is a hard pass for me. It's basically just that "Welcome" sign that everyone out of town loves, but I personally find pretty tacky. I think its the little circles around the letters that get me. It just looks - bad.

Grade: 3/10 - Basic copy of the sign, not enough difference



Inverted Sign


Another Reddit one. I actually like this one quite a bit, even though it incorporates that tacky sign that is posted on everything (probably because it flips the sign vertically, which I like, and eliminates the worst part of the sign, the "w-e-l-c-o-m-e" letters in little circles). I've always been a fan of narrow vertical logos, and the "LV" in Las Vegas just lends itself perfectly to overlapping letters like this.

Grade: 7/10 - but if you incorporated the yellow and blue colors the owners seem to be going with, it could go up to 8 or 9.



The Shield

This one was posted on the Las Vegas Lights twitter feed, so obviously they are giving it some thought. I like this one a lot - I've always liked logos that have some sort of symbolism to them (even if you have to explain it all in an infographic like here). It avoids the welcome sign, which is nice. And you can't go wrong with a nice shield shape. Finally, the icing on the cake is the diagonal stripes - I love a good sash, and maybe with this kind of a logo we could have a sash on they jerseys.

Grade: 8/10 - Wouldn't mind having this one at all.



Vertical Stripes

Two choices that the club put up on the Twitter feed. It's not bad. i definitely like the second option over the first (I've always found the soccer ball to be just a touch of overkill - we get it, it's a soccer team). The only downsides I see to this one are 1) they went pretty heavy on the starbursts, one would have been plenty, and 2) the vertical stripes, while cool, would probably mean that we are going with striped jerseys, which are ok, but I've never liked them all that much.

Grade: 5/10 - Too much stuff



The V for Vendetta

I'm really not sure what is going on here. It's a V, for Vegas, obviously. But where's the L? And what are those little flying multi-colored balls for? I don't really get this one, the logo is decent, I suppose, but I really don't get any sort of sense of "Las Vegas" or "soccer" from it at all.

Grade: 3/10 - No connection.


The Overachiever

I mean, how could we not choose this one?

Grade: "A" for effort



So, looking at my grades, I think (aside from the obvious choice being the last one), if I had to choose now, I'd go with the shield proposal. But if they make a few tweaks to that inverted sign, without adding too much to the logo, I think that would be my first choice.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.

Pro Soccer to Las Vegas!

Well here we are. Mere months away from professional soccer coming ashore in our very own town of Las Vegas.

I'm not going to lie, I thought this prospect was done and dusted after that vote a couple of years ago to prevent a soccer specific stadium from going up. It may not be an MLS team with a specific venue, but we can all be happy that some level of pro soccer is coming to town.

As of right now, we know the name and the location of the team, but everything else - from the logo, to the players, to the manager, to the color scheme - is still up in the air.

A few thoughts on the team name:

It was done through a controlled voting process. Nominations were taken from the community at large, vetted by the owners, and then they sent out a shortlist of six for the community to vote on. The six (if I remember correctly) possibilities were: Las Vegas FC, Las Vegas Action, Las Vegas Silver, Club Vegas, Viva Vegas, and Las Vegas Lights.

To be honest, I thought it was a pretty paltry list of options. There was the traditional stodgy "FC" option, then a parade of downright embarrassing choices (looking at you, Viva Vegas and Club Vegas).

At first I wasn't too high on Las Vegas Lights, but the more I think about it the more I like it. It's a very "American" choice (as in not a FC Las Vegas or SC Las Vegas). But hey, that's fine, we are in America after all, so it matches with the American sporting tradition. And if you are going to go with the [City Name] [Mascot] format, there are certainly worse options.

To be frank, it's probably the best name of a sports team in town. I'd much rather have "Lights" than the "Golden Knights" (what does that have to do with Las Vegas?) or the competitor for worst-team-name-in-history, the Las Vegas "51s."

So, at the end of the day, the Las Vegas Lights was a solid choice. Well done to both the general public and the ownership group for choosing something decent.

Next in the pipeline is the logo. Again, they are calling for suggestions, and we have to assume they are going to do the same vetting process and community vote for the logo. I've seen a few of the proposals so far, and some of them look pretty decent. I'll probably take a look at some of them in the next post.

Until then