What’s in a name?
For new WNBA Toronto Tempo fans and branding experts, it seems, everything.
And no one is shy about expressing an opinion over the logo for the fledgling women’s basketball franchise.
Sports branding guru Chris Creamer’s first reaction to seeing the Tempo logo last December was immediate — lacklustre.
“I expected a little more,” said Creamer, who launched SportsLogos.net nearly 30 years ago from his parents’ basement in Oshawa. “I really wanted this to be something cool, something to get excited about, and then being hit with this was a bit of a downer.”
Creamer has curated, catalogued and critiqued the logos, names and uniforms of hundreds of teams around the world, from professional leagues to obscure third-tier colleges, racking up millions of views on his website along the way.
In December, his WNBA page grew larger after Toronto’s name and logo were leaked and, subsequently confirmed, which some fans described as “bland” and, more bluntly, “horrible.”
“There was nothing special that tied it to Toronto,” Creamer, now based in Port Perry, said. “You can literally take this team and pretty much drop it into any market and make up some sort of story that goes along with the design and the name and it would apply anywhere.”
Perhaps acceptance of the new logo will take time as Toronto has a long history of sports brands facing early criticism.
Just days after the Toronto Raptors’ branding was unveiled in May 1994, one Torontonian buying freshly minted merch at the Eaton Centre was overheard describing the team logo as “Barney on steroids.”
“If Barney ever pumped iron,” they said, “that’s what he’d look like.”
When the team eventually dropped the dribbling dinosaur from their uniforms in 1999, the Star’s then-fashion editor Bernadette Morra was relieved, calling it “garish” and “goofy.”
A Toronto resident likewise wrote to the Star in August of 1976 after the Blue Jays were christened, calling the name “inconceivable” and “hilarious.”
Another was upset that the name was “neither short nor relevant to Toronto.”
Eventually, both team’s logos became stalwarts of Toronto’s sports scene.
In January, the Toronto Tempo launched the sale of merchandise, including standard hoodies, T-shirts and hats, alongside the more unorthodox basketball-shaped planters and pillows.
Ana Rita Morais, associate dean of George Brown College’s School of Design who served as the team’s design mentor, said that the brand may “get kicked around in an effort to build itself back up,” but praised its dynamism and uniqueness developed through an “iterative process.”
“As soon as I look at the logo, I see it in motion,” Morais said. “I see something that’s not static. I see something that automatically carries what the name is, right? There’s already fluidity to it, there’s already rhythm to it.”
Added Morais, “like many things, when it’s new and it’s innovative and it’s still young, it doesn’t have the identity that you want it to have, and part of that will come as you continue to build the environment around the thing.”
Tempo team president Teresa Resch has perhaps channeled Oscar Wilde in coming to terms with the team’s logo being talked about — negatively or positively.
“We honestly consider ourselves lucky that people have feelings and opinions about what we’re doing — it means they care, and in the long term, that’s going to set this franchise up for incredible success.”
Todd Radom, a Philadelphia-based graphic designer, crafted the logo of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever among numerous other championship, league and all-star game logos. He likes “Toronto Tempo” for its positivity, but says the ‘Hydrogen Blue and Bordeaux’ colour scheme has “no real pop to it.”
Vijay Setlur, a marketing instructor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, said he likes the name’s simplicity, but added that it will need to be meaningfully linked to Toronto’s character as it gets fleshed out in merch and ad campaigns.
“It’s a name that’s generic enough that people can kind of add meaning to it on their own,” Setlur said. “So there has to be that associative link between Tempo and the WNBA team and with women’s basketball and then, ultimately, the name can live on its own equity.”
Ultimately, Creamer says his criticism of the team’s branding is grounded in his desire to see it succeed.
He wants to be able to take his daughter to see a thriving women’s basketball team, but said he’s concerned that its uninspiring start could hurt it a little bit.”
Radom is more optimistic, noting that a brand needs to come to life before it can be fully evaluated. That means seeing the logo on jerseys, scoreboards and TV screens outside of its unveiling.
“I don’t care who you are, we are all predisposed to a hot take when a new logo for a team comes out,” Radom said. “No brand really comes to life — especially that of a sports franchise — until you see players out there moving up and down the court.”
As for the Jays and Raptors?
When the Blue Jays changed logos in 1996, many fans were outraged, praising the original as having “clarity.”
And the ‘Barney on steroids’ Raptors logo, for its part, has become subject of nostalgia and throwbacks from the team itself, with fans describing it at various points as “iconic” and “clean.”
With files from Astrid Lange
