Billings Mustangs

-1

The Mustangs' new logo is a vast improvement over the old one, which was just a BIC (Baseball in Circle) with a silhouette of a mustang in front of the baseball. Now we have a rendering of a mustang charging right at the viewer. This is much more effective because wait a damn second what the hell is wrong with that poor creature's leg?

Here, let me give you a close-up in case it's not clear from the logo at the top of the page: Yeah, that weird growth coming out of the horse's front right (left from the viewer's perspective) leg. That's what I'm talking about.

Actually, it's a pretty nifty thing, just done wrong.

Look a little farther down the page and you'll see one of the Mustangs' alternate logos. There you can clearly see that the nifty thing is a geologic formation. This is part of what's known as the Rimrocks, a series of rock formations that basically surround the city of Billings. Without going into too much detail, millions of years ago the Yellowstone River (which runs through Billings) was a much bigger river, and cut a massive canyon through the sandstone in the area, and the city of Billings sits in the part of that canyon that is no longer part of the river. I'm not sure which specific part of the Rimrocks the formation in the logo is supposed to represent (or even if it's an actual formation rather than just something that looks like it could be), but all in all the Rimrocks are pretty cool looking. I totally get why the logo designer wanted to include something like that in the logo. Unfortunately, while it looks great in the alternate logo, in the main logo it looks like the horse has some bizarre growth on its leg. Remember the movie The Elephant Man from the 1980s? This looks sort of like the Elephant Mustang. I kinda hate to make such a comment because I do genuinely think including the formation was a cool thing to do and I do genuinely think that most of the logos the team now has are really neat, but the way that formation was incorporated into the main logo was a mistake.

And it's not the only mistake I see in the main logo. The tail they added to the capital M in Mustangs makes it look sort of like it says Lustangs. I don't know what a Lustang is. I don't want to know what a Lustang is. I don't even want to jokingly speculate about it.

That said, I have almost nothing bad to say about the logo aside from these two things. The red/tan/black color scheme really shouldn't work, but it damn sure does. And if you ignore the rock formation/Elephant Mustang and instead look at the horse's head, it's quite intimidating. It's coming right toward you, it's looking right at you, and the combination of the ghostly white eyes and the red outline makes it look like a demon horse from hell. Beyond the horse, the horseshoe surrounding the logo frames everything quite well, and is a subtle nod to the way the Rimrocks surround the city. Even with the unfortunate placement of the rock formation, this is a hell of a good logo.

And while I don't factor alternate logos into the scoring, the alternate logo is great, too. I won't suggest it should be the primary logo because the head-on look in the primary logo is too good, but if the team decided for some reason to promote the alternate logo to the primary, I wouldn't complain.

Basically, I feel like I'm being a bit of a dick to comment on the formation in the primary logo and the "Lustangs" bit. But then again, I am a bit of a dick, so there you have it.

Final Score: -1 point.
Penalties: Scenery, 11 pts.
Bonuses: Logo, -12 pts.