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Popular Culture Review
McCaskey, owns the team. McCaskey contacted us by phone, and we taped a
half-hour interview.
The analysis proceeded along aesthetic/historical lines, examining the
artistic factors in team logo design that changed due to particular historical
events—in this case broadcast of football games on television. The aesthetic
analysis was defined in part by the compositional interpretation of Rose (2001),
although the method was modified to compensate for its weaknesses. Rose’s
method relied on the contextual information of the particular object under study
(Rose, 2001). The composition of the visual phenomena, however, was of
central interest. A number of visual elements work in combination to form a
logo’s composition.
Color is an important component of sports team logo design, a highly
symbolic feature of any visual image, especially with regard to its simplicity.
We examined color along three dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness, with
hue describing the color itself: red, blue, green, etc.
Saturation describes the strength or purity of a color, and highly saturated
color looking rich and low saturated color as washed out. Saturation also
contributes to a color’s energy, “the relative aesthetic impact a color has on us”
(Zettl, 2005, p. 65). Highly saturated colors generally appear more energetic
than unsaturated ones. They are “simple, almost primitive” (Dondis, 1973, p.
51). “The more intense or saturated the coloration of a visual object or event, the
more highly charged it is with expression an