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I think this on topic, in how this issue is being dealt with by another Club, compared to the handling by Villa. Interesting that the Bournemouth President of Business Operations, Jim Frevola, immediately responded to the news stories about their crest change on Twitter. https://x.com/jimfrevola/status/1761830730361983339?s=20 "Nothing to see here. The trademark logo people are reading about today is all part of securing our logos for future use (think retail ). We wouldn’t consider changing this primary beauty of a badge without significant fan consultation"

The Euros kits, likely to be launched in the Spring (and subject to recent leaks) give a good indication about the next wave of Adidas shirt construction / general template.

...But it will be interesting how far they push the wider merchandising. There's so much potential. Arsenal, United, and Newcastle all have a history with the brand, so they can mine a rich seam of heritage. United and Arsenal do frequent re-make releases of classic shirts. I'm sure we will see the mid-90s Newcastle shirts get the same treatment. They also seem to do an 'Icon' series for the Elite tier teams every year inspired by a particular era. I'd love to see to see some 'alternate history' 70s, 80s and 90s style retro Villa kits using the classic Adidas templates of the time. Lot's to get excited about.

Adidas recent highlights reel: They seem to be in a real design peak at the moment. Some very simple / classic designs, plus some that push the envelope. I hope we get the long sleeve versions.

A huge coincidence that just as a significant negative reaction to both the trademarked crest and the handing of the consultation process is building up, a big new deal with Adidas is reported by a major news publication.

As a fellow designer, this post does a really good job of expressing pretty much how I feel about the wider situation and the detailed design of the new Trademarked crest. Someone also made a great point about the cost saving benefits of this remixed version using the existing lion (that is already plastered all over the ground and printed on promotional assets and merchandise stock), which is most likely the driving force behind it. Though of course this won't be the reason expressed to the fans. The decision is based on a short term gain (or minimised loss) rather than long term benefit. As stated in the middle of the quoted Post, this whole process should have been an opportunity to sort out the visual identity of the Club, not just the crest. The current visual identity is almost non-existent and totally muddled at best. I makes us look small time and amateurish. We should be entrusting a top agency to do something like this: https://www.dixonbaxi.com/work/acmilanbrand https://thisaway.co/work/forward-thinking-football https://someoneinlondon.com/projects/the-pack-is-back https://www.nssmag.com/en/sports/30484/venezia-logo-borsche-bureau https://im.inter.it/en/?utm_source=news&utm_medium=en&utm_campaign=IM It's interesting to re-watch the video that Dragon Rouge made for the 2 crest options, including the reasoning behind the design decisions (https://www.dragonrouge.com/news/why-our-aston-villa-crest-redesign-is-great-for-all-football-fans-eng/), and hinting at how they could be rolled out.

The proposed / leaked crest looks like a bit of a mess. Others have mentioned it but it's like there was an Apprentice task to rebrand Villa in an afternoon. It recycles existing assets (lion, star and colour scheme from the 'old' badge, together with the Font from the rejected Gaslamp crest), adds 1874 in a default neutral font, and places them within a new shield that has been engineered to not look like too much like the current one, or those of other teams. I think people found the 'Gaslamp' Crest a bit underwhelming, and fans have a real attachment to the old round crest for obvious reasons, so it was never going to win the vote, but it's a solidly designed crest, that resolves a most of the issues with the the AVFC shield. It has a strong distinctive shape, with a nice rationale/story, a good fierce looking lion, nice bespoke typography, decent contrast, and a sense of horizontal and vertical balance. I'd delete the star though if I was to tweak it. Personally, I'd like something very unique with wow factor like the Juventus J Shield or Venezia's bold V, but the 'Gaslamp' is an acceptable middle ground if the Club feels that it can't stray too far from the norm. This new leaked 'proposed' shield design, while adding 'Aston Villa', seems to create more problems than it resolves. The vertical balance is off; the small size of the 1874 and its position between the text and lion creates awkward space in the lower centre of the badge; the drop shadow attempting to create some depth and contrast, looks awkward, cheap and dare I say it lazy (Chelsea's badge - we love this comparison! - uses a drop shadow, but in a much more subtle way and the shadow is applied to the dark blue lion on a white background, so it does not stick out like a sore thumb); the double shield outline (forming a triple outline when coloured) adds visual clutter and busyness to the crest, draws the eye away from the main elements; the shape feels over-designed in order to create something that is slightly different from the existing version, and other major British Club shields (Arsenal, Burnley, Everton, Fulham, West Ham, Newcastle, Leeds etc, together with the insert shield in City and United); the text alignment clashes with the point of the shield; 1874 in Helvetica seems like an afterthought; the lion lacks detail and texture, looking flat and low impact. Ultimately, to undertake yet another re-design in such a short period was never going to work out well. If they wanted to do it they should have taken a year, and launched post-the 150 anniversary. Instead, it looks like it's been fudged in-house with predictable results.

Yeah, it's a question of vertical balance. The lion looks like it is standing on one foot precariously balancing on the 1874. Achieving a harmonious balance in a design is tricky. If you look at other premier league badges (including the current AVFC shield), most achieve this reasonably well. Spurs and Palace have birds perching on a ball with text under, but it looks natural The small size of the 1874 and its position between the text and lion also creates awkward space in the lower centre of the badge. This is made much worse when coloured and scaled down (i.e. on most mobile apps) since you loose the white 1874 within an expanse of sky blue. This is a similar problem to the yellow lion on sky blue that has been an issue for years with the flat version of the badge.

I see a Pizza slice! Maybe that says more about me.

Ticks a lot of boxes

Not sure if this has been shared on here. Daniel Norris' retro badge remakes.

I think, the power dynamic with the shirt sponsors is different to that with the manufacturer. The third party designer says in the podcast, that Adidas gave them strict parameters to work with (e.g this core template, these collar options, shirt base colour, plus 2 accent colours), they then had to work creatively within that. It just so happened the designer was a Leeds fan, so they went to town on the research/development and managed to find a way of maximising what they could do with those elements, which I think the fans have been overwhelmingly happy with. I'd imagine Leeds, Fulham and Leicester are on a similar contracts with Adidas, far below Arsenal, Man U, Juve, and Bayern, but you can see the difference with what they have managed to come up with when compared to Fulham and Leicester. I'm fascinated what Villa's attitude is to all this, and what briefs they are giving to the designers. Whether there is any long/medium term strategy on the kits? For example, I'd like to see us go traditional with the home shirt for 2 or 3 years, then every 4th year, bring back stripes or do something different that is still identifiable as a Villa kit. When was the last time we had stripes on the home shirt, 1999/2000? Also, the yellow, 'Brazil style' away kit for 93 is a bit of classic, but they have never gone back to that yellow, blue and claret colour scheme as far as I can remember.

To clarify, the point is that the more the front of shirt sponsors and sleeve sponsors pay, the less likely they are to agree to having their logos in the Club Colour scheme, particularly on the home shirt which will be most visible through the season. So, I'd hope someone at Villa asked 'BK8' and our sleeve sponsor whether we could have the logos in white during the contract stage, but they obviously ended up with the white and orange logos, which will massively detract from any claret and blue home shirt in my opinion. Makes it look more cluttered. It's one of the reasons why the podcast is interesting, because it reveals that there's certain things that are beyond club control, or extremely difficult to negotiate, that the designers just have to take on the chin.

With the rumours that we might be ending the Castore deal early and switching manufacturer, I've seen Adidas brought up a lot. There's some concern that we would not be an one of their 'elite' level clubs and therefore get the basic template stuff like Leicester and Leeds etc do. But, it seems like even in this scenario, there's interesting bespoke things that can be done above just sticking the club badge on a template kit. I just finished listening to a Podcast (The Square Ball - Leeds fan podcast, but very well done), that explains in a decent amount of detail the process between the designer (Acid FC), Manufacturer (Adidas), Club, and sponsors. The designer does admit, that one of the knock on impacts of relegation, meant that they had enough sway with the sponsors to get all the colours properly matched up to the blue on the home shirt, which probably wouldn't have happened in the Prem (see our orange BK8 monstrosity). It would be interesting to see what Adidas could do for us, if they partnered up with a kit designer who was a Villa fan . Would highly recommend the four episodes on the kit. The first is linked below.