UNLV Sports to ‘Refresh Marks’ When Football Team Moves Into New Stadium in 2020; New Logo is Benched
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
On the eve of a new year, UNLV’s sports staff is ushering in good news for the Las Vegas citizenry who were were not exactly in love with an updated UNLV logo from 2017 that featured a complicated figure of a western-looking cowboy.
The logo was too cluttered to decode and included an index explaining the various logo features.
So, UNLV athletics pulled the plug on the logo, releasing this statement Friday: “UNLV Athletics is exclusively using the iconic UNLV arch logo and no new items with the new mark are being approved through the licensing process. Through our upcoming apparel contract negotiations, a potential new logo will be something that is evaluated. We plan to refresh our marks with an unveiling in 2020 to coincide with the move to the new stadium. The UNLV arch will not go away.”
The new logo did find its way on ball caps that were sold in Costco, for example. But most UNLV clothing retained the Hey Reb logo.
The sports teams also did not adopt the logo, with the football team jerseys and helmets using the arched “UNLV.” UNLV sports kept the Hey Reb and arched UNLV look even after the athletics department rolled out earlier this year a new Be a Rebel branding campaign,
Clearly, with UNLV’s football team preparing to move from Sam Boyd Stadium to the new Raiders stadium in 2020, UNLV wanted to inaugurate its transition with a new, more iconic logo than the complicated logo unveiled last year.
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Typically, college sports logos are simple and bold, making it easy to associate the symbol with the university brand.
After UNLV’s logo drew criticism in 2017, Las Vegas baseball fans in 2018 wondered what was up with the new Las Vegas Aviators’ logo, which also suffered from logo-too-busy disease. Fans could not figure out the Aviators logo, comparing the figure to The Fly or Ant-Man comic book figure.
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