I went to college at the University of Michigan. Its football team is the winningest in college football history. Its conference, the Big Ten, is the oldest and possibly the most prestigious in the country. The logo is pretty damn awesome, viewed in light of the principles of negative space I discussed in the first part of my Design and Branding series:
See the number 11 in there?
Historically, the Big Ten had ten members since forever. This changed when the conference admitted Penn State as the eleventh member in 1993. The dilemma was then to either change the name of the conference or end up keeping a numerical name that was factually inaccurate. Frankly, the first option wasn’t going to happen; the name “Big Ten Conference” just had too much value as a brand name. So the conference went with the second option, but figured out how to brilliantly incorporate the fact that there were now eleven members: they hid the number “11″ inside the logo. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo, 
the 11 in the Big Ten logo is hard to see at first, and then impossible not to see after you notice it. The Big Ten’s logo is simple, elegant, powerful, and subtly clever–simply put, it’s everything you want in a logo.
…Until they changed it yesterday.
Earlier this year, the Big Ten Conference expanded to twelve members when it added the University of Nebraska. Like when it added Penn State, the conference had a problem of either changing the inaccurate name or keeping the valuable brand that was inaccurate. Like in 1993, the Big Ten opted to keep the name and the number ten. Unlike in 1993, it didn’t do anything clever like hiding the number 12 in the logo. Instead, we got this:
C for effort. B for execution.
A couple of things:
- It’s reasonably clever. We’ve got the number “10″ in there in place of the “IG” in “BIG.” But it’s kind of redundant because the conference’s name still has the word “ten” in there, and the “10″ is still inaccurate since there are now 12 members!
- The use of blue and white to differentiate “B1G” and “TEN” is pleasing to the eye. The actual azure used in the logo, however, isn’t that great. Bright colors denote flash and excitement, yes, but darker colors denote professionalism, which is the calling card of the Big Ten Conference. They should’ve stuck with the navy blue from the earlier iteration.
- Although the white “TEN” is technically negative space, it’s not really effective use of negative space. It’s just a word. There’s nothing hidden inside like in the earlier Big Ten logo or the FedEx logo.
- That said, I like the font they used; the blue shapes created by the white “TEN” are interesting–particularly the blue around the letter “E.”
- The “G” in “B1G” is close enough to the letter “6″ that the logo wouldn’t have to change too much if, as per conspiracy theorists, the conference expands again soon to 16 teams. That said, there’s no way they’ll actually keep the same logo with only minor changes if they expand again; every subsequent expansion from here on out will bring a new logo, if only to keep the branding “fresh.”
All this sums up to a logo that has some good parts to it, but is overall pretty weak. I am by no means a whiz at Photoshop, but this is something I could’ve come up with in about five minutes. There’s definitely something to be said for simplicity, but let’s all agree that a simple logo doesn’t have to look amateurish. The new Big Ten logo looks amateurish. It’s not terrible, but it’s not exactly good, either. It’s just…blah. And when you’re spending millions to make a flashy new logo, that counts as a decided failure.
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