HotRods and Cougars rebrand

The Bowling Green HotRods (A Full Season affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays) and the Kane County Cougars (A Full Season affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks) have unveiled new logos and uniforms.

The HotRods presented new team colors, new logos and new uniforms for the 2016 season.
The new eye catcher are the new colors: navy and orange. The navy refers to the nickname of their home state Kentucky: The Bluegrass State. The primary logo contains the club name and in the navy part there are the city’s initials.

The new model of Hot Rods baseball was created by New York based design firm, SME Branding, who has worked on other notable brands such as the Miami Marlins, Los Angeles Galaxy and the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The bottom of the G in the cap logo has the shape of a tailpipe flame.

The new primary logo will be accompanied by four alternate logos and two new wordmarks used on the jerseys. The afore mentioned “BG”  will serve as the team’s typographic ligature. The Hot Rods car has been revamped into a sleek new street rod. A baseball inside a tailpipe flame will be the secondary logo. And playing off the design of the primary logo, the new patch logo features the same outer circle design with a cross wrench and bat design in the middlt. The Hot Rods home wordmark features sleek tailing letters and is designed in an upward motion. The new road wordmark features Bowling Green written in stylistic lettering representative of the original Corvette.

The new uniforms are not an improvement, and I didn’t like the old ones. But the caps… Oh the caps. The home cap and the alternate caps are simply awesome. Especially the alternate cap with the baseball in tail pipe flame logo is very slick.

Another team that rebranded is the Kane County Cougars. After 25 years the club finally gets rid of one of the dullest logos in baseball and replaced it with a fresh new one that looks a little bit like the logos that US national parks have. The new logo features evening-shadowed evergreen trees of the western Chicago suburb behind a fierce looking cougar with a baseball bat resting on it’s shoulders, and the team nickname written in in a furry white cursive in the foreground, all of it framed by a park ranger’s badge.

Creative direction for the new logo was led by Cougars graphic designer Emmet Broderick together with Studio Simon, a sports brand identity firm whose portfolio includes numerous professional sports franchises, collegiate teams and leagues throughout the world.

As soon as the club comes up with the new jerseys and caps, you will see them here.