Volume 11, Number 1: Fanfare for the Common Ram

For the first time in a few years, I'm participating in another of Uni Watch head honcho Paul Lukas' Redesign The... contests on ESPN.com. Earlier this month, he invited Uni-Watch readers to submit new design concepts for the newly-relocated Los Angeles Rams (who recently left St. Louis after 21 seasons there).

Although the changes I've made are, I imagine, subtle compared to other designs submitted for this competition, they collectively make for a design that, in my estimation, stands out and can stand the test of time.  Here it is (click on the images to see them in their original size--you'll especially need to do this to see the uniform set in more detail).

The changes I made are as follows:

1. Color scheme: "Millennium blue" stays, but "new century gold" is out (replaced by yellow). Why? The contrast between the navy blue and the yellow is striking (then again, I would know because my alma mater wears maize and blue). Also, yellow is the color of the sun, so it makes more sense in sunny southern California.
2. The horns finally have ridges!  Rams' horns have ridges, and earlier LA Rams and Cleveland Rams logos had them as well. When Fred Gehrke painted those horns on the team's helmets in 1948, it would have been too much to ask him to also paint all those little ridges. But here in the 21st century, there are no excuses--we don't use paint, we use decals; furthermore, we have the technology to put ridges on those horns without making a lot of extra work.
3. Back to the Futura (as in Futura Display). Between 1972 and 1982, the Rams' wordmarks used the Futura Display font. What's more, that font was popular in the 1940s, when the Rams moved to LA from Cleveland. Point being, it's a font you could say the Rams own.  Why not use it for uniform numbers and NOBs? I could understand them not using it three decades ago when almost everybody used block numerals (the Chicago Bears were the lone exception at that time). But times have changed in an era where teams try to look more distinctive.
4. Tweaking the logo: I decided to make changes to the logo the Rams have been using since their 2000 redesign instead of a whole new one.  First, I changed the colors to match the navy blue/yellow color scheme (see #1 above).  It was after I did this that I noticed something odd.  At that point, the logo looked not so much like a ram as like a horse with no mane wearing a helmet with no facemask that had ram horns painted on it.  So I thought I'd play around with the logo some more, starting with rotating it the horn by -15 degrees. I made a few other minor tweaks as well to the ram's face and the back of its neck.  The final touch: Ridges on the horn, of course! The graphic under this list is meant to give you some idea of how my version of the logo "evolved" from the current version.
5. Get that Nikelace outta here! In 2012, when Nike took over as the uniform maker for the NFL's teams, they introduced a new collar (officially called the Flywire collar, but hereafter referred to as "the Nikelace") that looked awful on teams whose jerseys have a different-colored collar. Five teams still use the "old" pre-2012 collars for that reason (Packers, Patriots, Falcons, Panthers, Eagles). The Rams should have followed their example. But instead, they went with the partially-colored Nikelace that some fans derisively call "the neck roll." I decided the old collar worked better.
6. No outlining on the numerals. Although the Rams experimented with outlined numerals in the 1950s (they were among the first NFL teams to do so), and used outlined numerals in their current uni design (2000-present), they generally didn't use them during their first stint in LA, and they don't need to use them now. 
7. No more white pants stripes.  They seemed out of place on the Color Rush unitards they wore against the Bucs, so I decided to go with one solid yellow stripe on the blue pants, and one solid blue stripe on the yellow pants.

You'll also see a "RETURN TO LA" commemorative patch in my submission. I did it because one of the contest's requirements was that you had to create one.  I'm cool with that, and I'm cool with what I slapped together--it's a take on the eponymous sign for the City of Beverly Hills (the extremely affluent LA suburb), but with the curlicues at the bottom replaced by ram's horns.

This is the first time I've submitted an entry in an ESPN.com-sponsored Redesign The... contest since 2013 (Miami Dolphins).  I didn't submit entries for more recent contests (Vikings, Hornets, Clippers, Blazers) because I simply couldn't come up with anything that I thought would be significantly better than what than whatever they had at that time.

That's all for now.  Thanks for reading.