It's interesting. I showed the new logo separately to about 20 kids and adults who are big Husky fans over the last few days. The kids were 8-12. The adults were in their 30's, 40's, 60's and 80's, lol. Since I didn't want one person's opinion to color another's, they were all seperate encounters. The outcome? I was very surprised at the UNANIMOUS dislike of the new logo. I fully expected one of them to go "Wow that's cool!" Never happened. When I asked the kids why they didn't like it the responses were essentially "It's ugly, it looks mean, and I loved Jonathan as he was. Some of the adults had similar thoughts. One person actually expounded on why they disliked it so.
"Our prior logo may not have been precisely a Husky, but that's what made him unique. It was iconic. When it showed up on TV you immediately knew it was UConn. The success of our teams over the past years with Jonathan as our logo had allowed it to be displayed a lot on the networks. If you showed a series of team logos and asked folks to identify the team, Jonathan would have been easily identifiable as UConn.This new version may more accuratley portray a Husky but so what--it's not unique to UConn. Show it on a TV screen before a highlight package and you'll be hard pressed to know what's coming--UConn? Washington? Northeastern? Someone, somewhere, somehow got too technical and lost sight of all the identity capital we had built up over the years. We had a unique representation that said UConn and we threw it away for canine accuracy. That's just not smart."
Will we get used to it? Probably. Will we sell more merchandise? Probably. Will I support it? Yes. But I'm frankly not impressed. If there was an on line vote of all alumni, I bet the new logo would be defeated in a landslide, and that's not the response the school was counting on.
