When Sunny Bonnell and her team from the commercial agency Motto started working with Ninjas In Pajamas (NIP), a 20-year-old sports team looking for a new look, they did a lot of research. The team had never worked in games or esports before, and they wanted to understand the space. They chatted with fans and people in the team and sketched hundreds of possible logo ideas over the course of over a year. When NIP unveils their new visual identity last month the reaction was immediate – and many of them were negative. “I don’t think we really knew at the time that the fans would find it so difficult,” Bonnell says.
NIP was founded in 2000 and the Swedish organization currently operates teams in Brave, FIFA, en Rainbow Six, although it is best known for it Counter-Strike group. His previous logo was a gold shuriken with lots of curves and sharp points. The new iteration maintains the same concept, but streamlines it, with neon yellow against a black background, and an angular shuriken with a stylized version of the kanji for ‘nin’ inside. It’s brighter, simpler and easier to recognize.
Bonnell says the new logo was needed for a number of reasons. These include the flexibility to scale across different platforms, as well as the lack of contrast between the black-and-brown color scheme. “There were just a lot of technical issues with the existing brand,” she says. The challenge, she adds, was to create a logo that not only retained the classic iconography associated with the team, but also felt fresh and worked in different mediums. “The brand had to pick up a lot.”
When the team started working on the project, they really zoomed in on the ninja part of the NIP name. There’s the kanji, as well as a color scheme inspired by the streets of Tokyo, and even a sound element; the designers devised a distinctive blade sound for the team to use in videos and on social media. “I felt like it was something they could really own,” Bonnell says of the ninja elements. “They had nothing to say. They had cool clothes and good teams, but they did not really have anything else that gave them a story to tell. ”
One of the challenges of modern logo design is to create something that can work virtually anywhere. This is especially difficult in esports. The NIP logo is used as a Twitter icon, a badge on jerseys, and even a virtual sticker that players can carry on guns. When personal tournaments return, the logo will be blown up on stage on large LCD screens. (Bonnell is especially excited about the last one. ‘It’s going to be so cool.’) To create designs that work in all these contexts, designers often use something flat and simple. The result is logos that tend to look the same.
“It gets harder over time,” Bonnell says of the process. “The more you add, the more complicated it becomes.” The new NIP logo attempts to circumvent this in a number of ways. For one, the shuriken is set aside to create a sense of movement, as if thrown. And although the logo is relatively simple, it is imbued with meaning, like the hidden word in the coat of arms. Actually, every element is meant to be ‘ninja!’ To shout.
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Photo: Motto
Giving an existing team a new identity is a tricky proposition. Just like in traditional sports, esports fans are connected to teams and their history. In fact, when Dignitas and Evil Geniuses, two longtime organizations, introduced dramatic redesigns, the uproar was so intense that they finally returned to their original logos.
Despite all the preparation, Bonnell says she was not quite ready for the amount of setback the NIP redesign received. “There’s a lot of hatred in esports that I do not know if I was prepared for,” she says. ‘I had to stop reading the comments because I was like’ Oh my god, I want to cry in my wheat flakes’. This is really bad. ”
It softened over time, she says. “The first day was rough,” she admits, but says that over time and the logo was displayed in more contexts – on jerseys, in real games – she began to receive positive feedback from fans who changed their minds. While other organizations may have struggled with the initial setback, Bonnell does not think this will happen with NIP.
“First they are mocked,” she says, “then they are honored.”