The U.K.'s Melbourn Squash Club (the sport, not the gourd) has a new logo. It's just a jumble of squiggly lines. It looks like any kid could have scrawled it in the margin of his Mead notebook during class. And it's the most perfect thing.
Created by Distil Studio, the Melbourn Squash Club's logo was designed to be as abstract as possible. Many athletic clubs try to show the equipment or players of a sport in their logo--a couple of crossed rackets at a tennis club, or a horse leaping over a fence at a racetrack. But for the Melbourn Squash Club, Distil Studio wanted to get away from all of that, to show the motion of the sport itself.
"The final icon--some of the more simple approaches just lacked the energy of our original thought," Distil's creative director, Neil Hedger, told Logo Design Love. "We kept much of the complexity of our first draft and opened up the spaces in-between to help visual clarity. The rebounds from the left and right provide a much stronger form. We also put in just a couple of curved sneaky drop shots to break up the rigidity of the lines."
The result is pitch perfect. Although the squiggly monogram contains a noticeable capital "M," the design otherwise evokes the motion of a frantic game of racquetball, as two players race back and forth, yelling and smacking a ball upon a closed squash court. As the designers at Distil themselves aptly note, the finished design brings every thwack, thud, and squeak of the game to life.