Back in October 1997, my good fried Bob Olson and I began brainstorming to come up with a new logo. I just wanted to come up with a smaller, cleaner, simpler look. I get a lot of e-mail from South End Zone visitors and throughout 1997, people had stopped writing out the words "South End Zone" in favor of the simpler "SEZ". I've never really liked the initials "SEZ" but as I started seeing them in visitor's e-mails, I started to like it. And I figured that companies such as AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network), and IBM (International Business Machines) can't all be wrong about the value of a nice set of initials. So, Bob and I messed around with a few ideas. Here is the very first drawing that Bob came up with:

We had some good ideas, so we decided to have someone who knows what they are doing take a stab at actually creating some sample graphics. I asked Jeff Oien of Web Designs to see if he could make our ideas come to life by drafting some preliminary designs. These are all of Jeff's ideas:

Though all of Jeff's ideas matched all of my criteria, I just did not feel right about them. So I suspended the project for a couple of weeks to think it over and try to figure out exactly what it was that I wanted.

Then, by chance, I happened to touch base with an old friend of mine that I worked with in California ten years ago. Mike Chylinski of Eclectic Consulting is a graphics geek like Jeff. We got to talking and Mike said he'd take a stab at it.

These are Mike's first ideas. You'll note for the record that at this stage, Mike was not spending any time on polishing or fine-tuning the images. We were just trying to find the right look:

Those were cool, but I wanted the 'SEZ' initials in the logo and I wanted to feature the green and gold colors a little more. So, Mike went back to the drawing board and we tossed the following ideas around for a while:

These above images were definately closer to what I had in mind. I wanted the URL to be clearer in the image and I wanted a little bit neater look overall. Also, I wanted to scrap the yellow color in favor of a more brownish color to give it that "old football" look. So Mike came up with these:

Hmmm, now we're getting somewhere. I consulted with Bob again, and decided to go with the second one. That just strikes me as a logo that represents a successful, historic, championship football team. The colors, the championship-like ribbon, the initials, the URL, it has it all.

So now I asked Mike to go into a "polishing" mode and to also think about some ideas for some buttons. Here are the designs that we kicked back and forth for about a week: