Northern Arizona University Announces Athletic Rebranding

Earlier this week, Northern Arizona University revealed their new visual identity for their athletics program. The identity, done by SME Branding (who can be found on twitter @SMEBranding) is definitely step towards modernity with the new, more progressive look.

From the press release:

The new logo and mascot succeed a decade-old design and reflect strength, pride, heroism, determination and hard work—insights student-athletes, alumni and the university community shared with the design team. The logo retains the symbolic axe that connects a century of students to their NAU experience.

In addition to new logos, the entire athletic program received new uniforms as well. We’ll focus on the football team here, but from the basketball teams to the track-and-field program, every athletic wing got brand new uniforms as a result of the rebrand.

The football team has relatively tame uniforms compared to the current world of big-time college football, where teams seem to have a uniform for every game of the season. NAU, on the other hand, only has 1 helmet, 2 sets of jerseys, and 3 sets of pants.

One thing that the team has done, is go with a fairly popular helmet design in college football, which is to put the logo on one side and the player’s number on the other side. I don’t get the appeal behind this look, but it’s a hot look in college football right now and I guess the players love it, and we all know that college football teams will do anything to keep their players happy, even if it means that design quality is sacrificed. Not to say that this isn’t a bad set of uniforms or a bad helmet, just that it would be a little bit better if the new logo got shown off on both sides of the helmet.

UPDATE (May 1/14, 12:38 PM):

As reader and twitter user @nickballouperez pointed out, NAU actually has more than one helmet; there’s a second, yellow helmet that’s also for use. So much for the whole “one helmet” thing.