The club promoted it heavily, draping 19,000 T-shirts over arena seats before the final home game. While the Hawks marketing department did not respond to requests for a statement, it is clear the club sees the value in the 1972 logo and its angry 2014 spawn. The NBA charges teams a fat fee for logo changes because it doesn’t want a lot of unsold merchandise rotting in a warehouse. Hawks press releases say the 1995 logo isn’t going anywhere, but the reason is likely financial, not devotion. When we worked on the design in 1972, we struggled with the fine line between a fierce bird and an angry bird. I might not have done exactly what their designers did, but I would have toyed with the look of the bird, too. “Re-launching any logo requires change to generate excitement. “Why bring back the iconic ‘Pac-Man’ logo but feel compelled to add to it? They actually diminish it because ‘more is less,’ as great Mies van der Rohe once said. He thinks the revisions to the original logo, which make for an angrier bird, are a design insult. Most importantly, it looked great on uniforms racing up and down a basketball court whether you were at a game or watching it on TV.” The 2014 version “The so-called ‘Pac-Man’ logo was classic, pure and honest. McDonald can’t understand why the franchise switched logos in the first place. Plus, the popularity of the original design never waned it remains one of the best-selling retro logos in the NBA. The reason is clear: the 1995 logo design is complicated and does not reduce well, plugging up in small applications. The Hawks were still using it as its Twitter avatar before replacing it with the new 2014 version. The Hawks introduced the current logo in 1995, but Wages’ logo never really disappeared. In 1999, he was named an American Institute of Graphics Arts Fellow by the organization’s local chapter. He is still designing today, and many of his logos are famous, including Cox Communications, Georgia State University and ZEP. In 1977, Wages left McDonald & Little to open Wages Design. Likewise, he says, the Flames’ intensity was suggested by the same red, the flame in the letter cross, and, mostly, “by the clever name that dramatizes the tension between the words fire and ice.” Looking back, Wages says the attitude of the 1972 Hawk was captured by three elements: “Coke Red,” its determined eyes, and the sharp point of the beak. It was smart branding, plain and simple.” The 1972 logo “It’s because they were designed for the same owners, at the same time, and developed to fit in with the OMNI logo designed by my boss, Ted Burn. Wages says many people have asked him over the years why the two franchise logos have the same line weight, same clarity, same scale and same color.
Everyone went to a lot of hockey games back then. “In some ways, the 1972 Hawks logo was eclipsed by the hullabaloo surrounding the Flames’ launch,” Wages remembers. The Flames launch campaign was entitled ”The Ice Age Has Come to Atlanta.” It was a monumental success, helping to sell 11,000 season tickets for the 14,000-seat OMNI Arena before the first season even began. “Straight out of design school, I was designing logos for two major league sports franchises. “You can imagine how I felt,” recalls Wages. When it came time to show the Hawks’ logo design, and later that of the Atlanta Flames, Putnam knew the logos were winners.”
#PAC MAN LOGO EYES FREE#
“He trusted us and so gave us free reign to find solutions. “Bill Putnam was CEO and GM of The OMNI Group,” said McDonald. McDonald & Little team, 1972: (L to R) Tom Little, Mike McDonald, Bob Wages, Ted Burn (seated). He asked Wages to design the teams’ logos. Ted Burn, the agency’s senior art director, “had a keen eye for talent and knew Bob Wages had an aptitude for logos,” recalls McDonald. The agency had been hired by a group of local investors (led by Tom Cousins, Charles Loudermilk, Paul Duke, Bobby Chambers and Dillard Munford) that owned the OMNI arena, the Atlanta Hawks and a new NHL franchise they’d soon name the Atlanta Flames. But it was the next assignment that would be a game changer for the young designer. On his first day at McDonald & Little, Bob Wages, an assistant art director, was assigned to a team to design layouts for an ad campaign promoting then-unknown Senate candidate Sam Nunn from Perry, Georgia. “He looked like a kid,” remembers agency cofounder Mike McDonald, 82, and still actively involved in marketing projects locally and globally.
Now 62, Wages conceived the iconic image as a 24-year-old, just out of college and new to his first job at powerhouse McDonald & Little.
#PAC MAN LOGO EYES SERIES#
When the Atlanta Hawks unveiled a revised version of the historic “Pac-Man” logo in Game Six of their playoff series against the Indiana Pacers, no one could have been happier than Bob Wages. Bob Wages with the 1972 logos he designed for the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Flames.
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