New NBA logo, I’m feeling pretty good about this one.
The Team
Like the 76ers, the Pistons are one of the 8 original NBA teams still in the league. They are not doing too well this year, but . There have been 2 significant eras in the Pistons organization, where they won their 3 championships:
The Bad Boys era (80s-early 90s)
Physical, blue-collar, balanced, defensive team led by Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, Vinnie “The Microwave” Johnson, a young and sane-looking Dennis Rodman, etc. Won championships in 1989 and 1990. If they weren’t rivals of the Celtics I feel like I would have loved these teams.
…the other good teams (2004-2006)
Sheed!
Physical, blue-collar, balanced, defensive team led by Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, Rip Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, and my all-time favorite Piston, Rasheeeeed Wallace. Won it all in 2004. They were one of the more unlikely championship teams because they had no superstar player. This team could have continued to contend for championships if they didn’t go ahead and draft Darko Milicic ahead of Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Chris Bosh in 03′.
Past/Current Logos
Fort Wayne Pistons - 1941/42 - 1947/48, 1948/49 - 1956/57
Yup, this happened. The team started in 1941 in the NBL as the Fort Wayne (Zollner) Pistons in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Owner Fred Zollner owned a foundry, which manufactured pistons for car engines, so that explains that. I can’t decide if this is supposed to be a guy in an Iron Man-esque piston suit, or a piston robot with human hands, but either way its pretty cool. The detailed illustration is a lot more impressive compared to other team logos from this time.
1957/58 - 1970/71
This is stright from Wikipedia, but “In 1949, Fred Zollner brokered the formation of the National Basketball Association from the BAA and the NBL at his kitchen table.” In 57′ he moved the team to Detroit and adopted this new logo. This is pretty generic stuff, at least the robot had some connection to the team name.
1975/76 - 1978/79
1979/80 - 1995/96
For 20 years or so the logos were pretty similar. This last one was definitely the best, but looks the least like an actual basketball?
1996/97 - 2000/01
This one is about as ridiculous as the previous ones are plain. It’s a great example of the over the top borders and whatnot that a lot of the modern logos suffer from. I do like that they tried to tie it into the car theme with the horse (horsepower!) and exhaust pipes, but it’s a little too much and the color scheme is garbage.
2001/02 - 2004/05
After a few years they at least went back to the blue and red colors. Good for them.
2005/06 - present
And here we are, the current logo. First, the positives: They stuck with the blue and red, and that does actually look like a real basketball. The font is pretty bad and this is still really generic. You could insert any city/team name here. If you were ordering cheap reversible jerseys for a basketball league, I feel like this would be an option.
The Redesign
Basically, I wanted this to look almost like a car logo. The team name and the city they play in is such a good match, and the current logo doesn’t reflect that at all. The text in the logo was heavily influenced by the Heuer logo, which has nothing to do with cars (shit) but I thought it had the feel of an old car logo.
Like I said before I did like the horse in the older Pistons logos, so I wanted to include that. One big inspiration for the horse was the Mobil pegasus logo. I also looked at a lot of Art Deco-style hood ornaments from old cars. these are perfect because they are simple and have a great sense of speed.
See the rest of my NBA logos here »