Our Take on the Washington Commanders Brand
After an 18-month-long process (and, of course, decades of petitions), the NFL's Washington Football Team introduced a new name. The Washington Commanders will now officially replace a "Redskins" moniker in place since the 1930s. And as we well know, with a brand new name comes a new brand, logo, look, and uniform.
Honestly, it's hard to critique others' work when you don't know all of the factors that went into it. This rebrand isn't any different; the challenge of rebranding while under the public eye's scrutiny to not offend is hard to face, not to mention how emotional this work can be.
And no matter what you create, it's rarely going to be unanimously celebrated, if ever. So believe us when we say, "We get it." But through our professional lens, we wanted to take a closer look at the elements of the high profile new identity of the Washington Commanders:
The only way to move forward is to stay away from any kind of Native American imagery.
Native American focus group participant
Making the Brand: Episode 2 | Path Forward | Washington Football Team | NFL
The Monogram
It may be overlooked at first, but you can clearly see the reference to military insignias in the mark and the direction they were taking. The angled cuts and serifs are working to signify forward movement and progress. The "W" monogram is strong, stronger than most in the NFL, actually. Take, for instance, the Chicago Bears' "C" or the Green Bay Packers' "G," today, these marks rely heavily on their nostalgia and history, yet the marks themselves aren't very refined.
The Wordmark
For us, their secondary wordmark doesn't work as well as the monogram. While being quite authoritative with its thick lines and condensed type, it doesn't have a lot of excitement to it. There is some visual interest with the cut angles on the "C" and the "S." But it's also distracting from the rest of the word given how different they are from the rest of the letters.
The Name
It seems that the word Commanders is what most people are having difficulty getting behind. It's long for an NFL team, the longest in the league. Thankfully for other franchises, they can shorten them. The San Francisco 49ers to the 'Niners. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Bucs. But Commanders doesn't really lend being shortened. The Commies? The Commandos? Neither of those has a great ring to them for obvious reasons.
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It's hard to make everyone happy. However, we think they probably did as good a job as they could have possibly done, given the circumstances. We don't love or hate this rebrand, but we acknowledge that while some of it feels foreign and strange now, this brand will seem like all others in the NFL and won't seem so out of place at all in a few years.
