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There’s a certain amount of hubris associated with a professional athlete getting someone (or a marketing firm) to design a personal logo for him or her. We get it, the sport is the sport and (probably) pays handsomely in and of itself, but there’s MORE money to be made out there.
Over the years, we’ve seen some good pro sports athlete brand logos and we’ve seen our fair share of bad ones.
Luka Doncic, who recently signed a shoe deal with Jordan Brand, already has a couple of player exclusive shoes to his name (not to be confused with a signature shoe, that’s a whole different beast). Luka is a brand who’s star power is rising with almost every game he plays for the Dallas Mavericks.
His brand power reached an exclusive level last week when the 20-year-old phenom was selected as an NBA All-Star (his first, although he should have been one during his rookie season but that’s another story), and even before his brand power could savor that bit of news, it was announced that Luka was a starter for the West.
I knew Luka would, sooner rather than later, have a brand logo and quite frankly I was already cringing. I anticipated a logo that would be hurried and just put out there to capitalize on his hyper speed traveling brand, but I was definitely (pleasantly) surprised when I spotted this on his shoes recently:
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What I at first assumed, from a distance, were lightning bolts (they do give off that vibe), actually turned out to be his new logo. Could it be? Did Luka actually have a well-designed brand logo?
I immediately hit up Luka’s website (lukadoncic.com) and lo-and-behold, there it was in all its metal-music-genre glory:
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The logo is, in fact, good. It’s very good.
The way the inverted number 7s align to form a sandwich with the “D” for Doncic is nothing short of a tasty masterpiece. Luka’s logo might actually be the Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich in the pantheon of NBA player logos. And much like that fantastically popular sandwich, Luka delivers, too.
I have to imagine the artist used that particular font to also give the viewer a sense of a lightning bolt because Luka’s tenure in the NBA has been every part electrifying.
Kudos to the art team behind Luka’s logo. May we continue to see this lightning bolt sandwich riding a wave of a metal song for a long time to come.