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The Big 10 & Design by Committee

The Big 10 released a new logo this week as well as the names of the two divisions the conference will compete in when Nebraska joins next season.

Rather than something that, we don’t know, actually makes sense and means something, the conference has decided to name their divisions Leaders and Legends.

The logo and division names are textbook examples of design by committee, illustrating perfectly why having a group of people with no creative skills make creative decisions almost always fails. In an attempt to be all things to all the member schools, the Big 10 ended up being nothing.

In a Chicago Tribune story league commissioner Jim Delany tried to explain the rationale behind all this:

Geographical names such as “Great Lakes” and “Great Plains” would not have been accurate. Delany told the newspaper that league officials felt that names such as “Hayes” and “Schembechler” or “Grange” and “Griffin” would not have been “inclusive” to all 12 schools.

“We’ve been down that road before,” Delany told the newspaper. “The (Big Ten) Icons created a lot of controversies on campuses. And when I’ve tried to develop a Big Ten-type Hall of Fame, (school officials) ask: ‘How many will I have? Who goes in first?’ I know us. I think what we did was right.”

Sure, it was right if you don’t care what the end result is.

In a story in Smashing Magazine, Speider Schneider highlights the problems with design by committee and it’s easy to picture Big 10 officials having these same conversations.

Schneider first quotes Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering Silicon Valley technology, and a widely respected and influential person on the web:

There’s a saying I love: “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” A variation is “a Volvo is a Porsche designed by committee.” Some of the best product advice I’ve ever heard goes something like “damn what the users want, charge towards your dream.” All of these statements are, of course, saying the same thing. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen all you get is a mess. And when too many people have product input, you’ve got lots of features but no soul.

We would agree that the Big 10 logo clearly does not possess a soul.

Schneider also highlights the process designers go through when dealing with committees:

Wanting to feel I was not alone, I posed the question to the art directors among my umpteen connections on LinkedIn. The responses were varied, passionate and maddening at times. One of my favorite Los Angeles art directors gave me a list of her favorite sayings overheard in committee meetings:

• My wife wants more circles.
• My husband says it doesn’t hit him in the gut.
• My kids say there are too many words.
• My dog didn’t wag its tail.
• The waiter said he’s seen something just like that in France.
• I need more oopmh 
in it.
• I’ll know it when I see it. So go back and make more.
• I love what _____ did. Can you do the same, but with carrots?

One creative director added these: “Why isn’t my logo bigger?”, “Why can’t we use all of this empty space over here?” and “It’s too promotional”.

He adds: “
Anything from anyone who’s ever said, ‘I’m not creative, but…’ or ‘It needs more… something.’ And anything from anyone who ‘knows what they don’t want but has to actually see what they do want because they can’t describe/direct/vocalize it.”

The funny thing is, the previous logo with the hidden 11 in it was actually pretty cool. But the conference decided to get away from that.

“Every one of the professionals we interviewed from the West Coast to New York said we needed to move beyond that,” Delany told the Tribune. “The notion was that it distracts. The ’11’ was seen as transition, a little bit of a gimmick. It’s no longer about the number. It’s about the values and characteristics that the schools represent.”

Yeah, if you are going to be a conference with 12 members but call yourself the Big 10 you probably want to move away from highlighting that fact.

A commenter at Uni Watch probably summed up the whole thing the best:

“Not worth protesting the particular design of the logo as long as the name of the conference continues to be ‘Big Ten’ and it has any number of member schools that does not equal 10. As long as the message being communicated is in and of itself wrong, then the aesthetics of the thing are moot. It’s one of those deals where there’s no right way to do it.”

It could be worse, though, at least we haven’t heard of anyone having a seizure while looking at the logo.