/ 18 November 2020

Identity Sketches for Houston Dynamo FC

MLS identity updates are back. This week, it’s Houston Dynamo.

Quick hit on the updated Houston Dynamo (FC!) change. Yes, it’s an improvement. Yes, I’m glad they kept “Dynamo” and I like the addition of FC. (FC is like Inc. for companies or .com for websites at this point – it just tells everybody you’re a soccer team. It doesn’t have to be more complex than that.) They smartly kept the the colors and brand legacy intact.

The monogram is too baseball-y for my taste. If it was alone, or by itself in the hexagon, you’d have something pretty memorable. Instead, most likely as a branding mandate, they crushed a bunch of text in there. I don’t love that. The weights seem thin – and as is visible in the tweet screenshot on this page, this mark doesn’t shrink down to an avatar size very successfully. The lightning bolt is a bit of a non-sequitur… but you need an emoji you can own, so, sure, go with it. Energy. My biggest issue is, much like the Quakes redesign of a few years ago, it’s just a soup of different ingredients inside a container. They don’t really call to each other or suggest a balanced whole.

I like the hex shape, and decided to make a quick response. This isn’t a deep dive, but it was fun to put together:

I’ll always opt for a simple, punchy application over a lot of competing elements.  Either way, congrats to Houston on their new look. We’ll take progress however it comes.