Some designers, like underrated players, are often not proportional to their popularity and magnitude. You don't know about him, but his work is everywhere...... This is the case with Alan Siegel.

A few days ago, Jerry est's statement in an interview with ESPN about "I don't want to be a logo man anymore" brought up the topic of the league logo. However, although we have identified those who can serve as the new Logo Man and make them the league's logo in a promiscuous way, in reality there is only one Logo Man in the NBA, and some things about this logo have been kept secret. This time, we will continue to sort through and try to unravel those "archives" that have been sealed for a long time. Let's see whose brilliant pen this logo started?

The first question is, why Jerry est? This seems like a cliché, and the answers are varied. There are several common explanations: one, because Jerry est is white. Of course, this makes sense in a specific historical context. The official birth of this logo was nearly half a century ago in 1970, and the design process began in the late 60s of the last century. It was a time when racism was at the height of racism in the United States, and the black movement was repeatedly frustrated, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King, the most influential leader of the black movement, in 1968.

In such a special period, many people feel that the NBA is not very adventurous and uses the image of black players to set a big tone for the entire league. As the most outstanding athlete representative of the league in the 60s and 70s of the last century, est is one of the few "perfect" on the court and a façade with no black spots off the court, if everyone feels that he is the player who appears on the league's logo, it will definitely be less controversial than Bill Russell, ilt Chamberlain, Big O or Elgin Baylor, and such as Billy Cunningham, Jerry Lucas or Dave Coens, the excellent white players of the same period, are all tall forwards, and they are certainly not as beautiful as the agile defenders like est in terms of the elegance of their movements......

In other words, if it had been designed a few years later, the logo we see today would probably have been the silhouette of players such as Pete Maravich......

However, there is another opposing view of this interpretation: the choice of Jerry est as the Coalition Logo Man has little to do with racism and suspicion, and the reason is Jerry est itself. First of all, EST is so good that even his rivals are convinced, as the soul of the Lakers generation, including Bill Russell and John Havlicek, who are Celtics celebrities of various periods, he has a higher evaluation of EST than some Lakers teammates.

It's a realm that makes opponents stumble and make them admire you from the bottom of their hearts, it's certainly not the same kind of player, and that's why the league awarded him the only Finals MVP on the losing side in 1969. This should also be a higher-level evaluation that goes beyond the victory or defeat of the sport itself. It must be very good to summarize this kind of player image as a league logo.

Historical reasons, skin color relationships, personality charm, spiritual rulers...... There are different opinions, which reason is more reliable? Perhaps there is only one person who can give you an answer that is closer to the truth of the matter - and that is the designer of the logo himself.

"It's dynamic, it's vertical and balanced, and it encapsulates the essence of the game" — says Alan Siegel, the designer of the NBA logo. Here's how he commented on his design. Let's take a look at what kind of designer Alan Siegel is.

Alan Siegel is a native of New York, and coincidentally, like Jerryest, Siegel got involved in brand design early on, and is one of the most prestigious corporate identity consultants in the United States in the last century.

The reason why Siegel is able to touch on the same in his own work. Siegel graduated from Long Island High School in New York, the same high school where NBA coach Larry Bron attended as a young boy. It is said that when he was a student, Alan Siegel also played basketball systematically and was good at long-range shooting, once shooting 9-of-10 from beyond the three-point line...... I don't know how much this had to do with the fact that he later took over the business of designing logos for the NBA league. After studying at Cornell University and then New York University School of Law, Alan Siegel went to Germany for some time to serve in the military. After returning to China, he was involved in many fields such as the communication industry, advertising creativity, etc., which were very popular at that time, and worked in many well-known companies in the industry, which also laid the groundwork for Alan Siegel's future customers, many of whom were giants in the information industry.

In 1969, the year Alan Siegel designed the NBA logo, the young New Yorker's career entered a new phase. Together with Robert Gale, another outstanding designer he has worked with, he has formed Siegel+Gale, a brand packaging company named after their last names, whose main business is to design logos and plan image packaging for major well-known brands, companies and emerging groups. In the early days of the company's development, Alan Siegel and his colleagues created many brand logos that would later be named classics and even worshipped, including the NBA logo based on the Jerry est dribbling silhouette based on the idea of the Major League Baseball logo, and many other logos that have also frequently impacted our attention and even become an indispensable scenery in life.

Like the NBA logo, these famous corporate logos are the work of Alan Siegel. What they and many of Alan Siegel's later designs have in common is their simplicity of form and bright colour palette in common. In the '70s and '80s, when many corporate logos were all about intricate and flamboyant styles, Alan Siegel's logos were even more memorable. Many of his proudest works, if summed up in the essence: try not to use the pattern as the dominant, but to use the eye-catching brand name text to give people a strong first sense and visual impression.

"Subtraction" in logo design is Alan Siegel's lifelong design philosophy, and the specific analysis can be said to be - to use the text itself, to use as few graphic elements as possible, to use simple graphics without complicated patterns, or to directly combine the form of letters and patterns. The "simple beauty" created in this way is the purest one. Although Alan Siegel has since left Siegel+Gale to start a new business, the slogan of Siegel+Gale, which has grown into an international avant-garde corporate planning company, is still the same as Alan Siegel: Simple is Smart.

In the mid-70s, Siegel's collaborator Robert Gale sold his stakes, and the company became more and more dominated by Alan Siegel's philosophy, and Alan himself began to make a name for himself during this period, designing some of the above-mentioned logos, as well as some of the supergiants in various fields that have become inseparable from our lives.