At the risk of straying into Paul Lukasville (a wonderful village to visit but I don’t know if I wanna live there), here’s the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Graeme Zielinski on a brewing brouhaha (sorry, it’s early) about the logo of the local 9.
Friday’s contest at Miller Park pitted the alphaglyph vs. the monograph; Ned Yost the catcher vs. Ned Yost the manager; the mind-twisting glove vs. the barley-framed “M”; the old school vs. the new.
With their torsos, fans of the Milwaukee Brewers voted with the force of a Carlos Lee clout for the logo designed in 1977 by then-UW-Eau Claire grad student Thomas Meindel: the “M” and “B” that form what is known in shorthand as “the glove.”
It was a promotion characterized by the Brewers as a form of market-testing, in which arriving fans were given the choice of free T-shirts with the glove or with the “M” logo of recent and lamentable years. But don’t expect any drastic changes anytime soon.
“We’re not going to make decisions on less-than-complete information,” said Rick Schlesinger, the Brewers’ executive vice president of business operations. And he said the decision need not be either/or, saying the old logo could make intermittent comebacks.
And new owner Mark Attanasio has given no public signals about whether he’d favor a retrenchment – which could lead to more merchandise sales.
That said, the bright yellow from the glove shirts seemed to be ascendant as an accent at Miller Park, or at least in the seats that were filled among the middling crowd of 21,804.
The official tally was 13,240 glove T-shirts to 7,970 for the current logo.
Echoing a sentiment common to Miller Park, where the Brewers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 8-4, Karen Waldkirch, 44, of Wauwatosa said, “Everything old-school is new again.”
Or, in the parlance of the day, “It’s stylin’,” said 12-year-old Nick Perez of Brown Deer as he took his seat. “I kind of like the combination of colors.”
For his part, Meindel, now 58 and running a graphics company in Eugene, Ore., said in a phone interview that he was gratified by the continuing popularity of his logo.
“I’m very proud that they chose my logo over the existing logo,” he said.
His version began as doodles during a stultifying psychology class. It came to life the next day in a studio in the home, for which he used his $2,000 prize money from the Brewers as a down payment.
(Ben Oglivie, stylin’)
“I think the design has withstood the test of time,” he said, allowing a “wow” when told by a reporter that it shows up with some frequency in rap videos.
As for the successor designs, the current “M” and a briefly-used interlocking “M” and “B,” Meindel said, “I looked at them and thought, ‘What were they thinking?’ “