Writing

Evolution of the Super Bowl Logo

From The New York Times, a collection of all 43 logos used to advertise the Super Bowl:

super bowl logos over time

The original article cites how the logos reflect the evolution and growth of the league. Which makes sense, you can see that it was more than fifteen years before it moved from just a logotype to a fully branded extravaganza. Or that in its first year it wasn’t the Super Bowl at all, and instead billed as “The First World Championship Game of the American Football Conference versus the National Football Conference,” a title that sounds great in a late-60s broadcaster voice (try it, you’ll like it), but was still shortened to the neanderthal “First World World Championship Game AFC vs NFC” for the logo, before it was renamed the “Super Bowl” the following year. (You can stop repeating the name in the broadcaster voice now, your officemates are getting annoyed.)

The similarities in the coloring are perhaps more interesting than the differences, though the general Americana obsession of the constant blue/red coloring is unsurprising, especially when you recall that some of the biggest perennial ad buyers (Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser) also share red, white, and blue labels. I’m guessing that the heavy use of yellow in the earlier logos had more to do with yellow looking good against a background when used for broadcast.

Or maybe not — like any good collection, there’s plenty to speculate about and many hypotheses to be drawn — and the investigation is more interesting for the exercise.

Monday, February 2, 2009 | collections, football, sports, time, typography  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.