When Sunny Bonnell and her team at the branding agency Motto started working with Ninjas In Pajamas (NIP), a 20-year-old electronic sports team in search of a new look, they did a lot of research. The team had never worked with games or electronic sports before, and they wanted to understand the space. They talked to fans and team members, and outlined hundreds of possible logo ideas over the course of more than a year. When NIP revealed its new visual identity last month, the reaction was immediate – and largely negative. “I don’t think we really knew at the time that fans would have such a hard time with this,” says Bonnell.
The NIP was founded in 2000, and the Swedish organization currently operates teams in Valorant, FIFA, and Rainbow Six, although it is most famous for its Counterattack platoon. Its previous logo was a golden shuriken with many curves and sharp points. The new iteration maintains the same concept, but simplifies it, with neon yellow against a black background and an angular shuriken that features a stylized version of the kanji for “nin” inside. It is brighter, simpler and more easily recognizable.
Bonnell says the new logo was necessary for a number of reasons. This includes the flexibility to scale across different platforms, as well as the lack of contrast between the black and brown color scheme. “There were a lot of technical problems with the existing brand,” she says. The challenge, she adds, was to make a logo that not only retains the classic iconography associated with the team, but also looks new and works in a variety of media. “This brand had to do a lot of lifting.”
When the team started working on the project, they really focused on the ninja part of the name NIP. It has kanji, as well as a color scheme inspired by the streets of Tokyo, and even an audio element; the designers created a unique swooshing sound for the team to use in videos and social media. “I thought this was something they could really own,” says Bonnell of the ninja elements. “They were missing something to say. They had nice clothes and great teams, but they had nothing else to give them a story to tell. “
One of the challenges of modern logo design is to create something that works anywhere. It is especially complicated in electronic sports. The NIP logo is used as a Twitter icon, an emblem on T-shirts and even a virtual sticker that players can put on the game’s weapons. When personal tournaments return, the logo will be displayed on large LCD screens on the stage. (Bonnell is particularly excited about the latter. “It will be so cool.”) To do something that works in all of these contexts, designers often resort to something flat and simple. The result is logos that tend to look the same.
“Over time, it gets more complicated,” says Bonnell of the process. “The more you add, the more complicated it becomes.” The new NIP logo tries to get around this in a few ways. On the one hand, the shuriken is placed on its side to create a sensation of movement, as if it were being thrown. And although the logo is relatively simple, it is imbued with meaning, like the word hidden inside the weapon. Basically, each element should shout “ninja!”
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Photo: Lema
Giving an existing team a new identity is a complicated proposition. As in traditional sports, esports fans are attached to teams and their stories. In fact, when Dignitas and Evil Geniuses, two long-standing organizations, introduced dramatic overhauls, the uproar was so intense that they ended up returning to the original logos.
Despite all the preparation, Bonnell says he was not quite ready for the number of strokes that the NIP redesign received. “There is a lot of hatred in sports that I don’t know if I was prepared for,” she says. “I had to stop reading the comments, because I was like ‘My God, I want to cry on my corn flakes’. This is very bad. “
This has decreased over time, she says. “The first day was difficult,” she admits, but says that as time went by and the logo was displayed in more contexts – on t-shirts, in real games – she started receiving positive feedback from fans who changed their minds. While other organizations may have struggled with the initial counter-coup, Bonnell does not think that will happen with the NIP.
“First, they will be ridiculed,” she says, “then they will be revered.”