Out of curiosity, how would you design the logo? Not that I want you to actually make one, but I mean what type of elements would you be looking to go for? If that's too much work, don't worry about it, I just have no design skill or really artistic knowledge, and don't really know what the best route to go is.
I would have designed the logo based on the expectations of the client.
The agency that handled this design did exactly what their client wanted so for that they are totally pro and did a great job.
It is clear that they satisfied the client. I mean I have no idea what was happening behind the scenes, except to say that there was a lot of concepts and that these concepts were culled and refined to be what we see today. I guarantee that there is a logo or two or three that most of us would have been totally excited about that didn't make the cut. If you watch that video they have - there is a shot of sketches of big-horned sheep getting ready to buck heads, this shows that the design team went through hundreds if not thousands of different renderings and approaches, some of which we might have been totally excited to see, and some of which the design team might have initially preferred and even fought for - in the end the client makes the decisions and you have to listen to what they want or you get fired.
So it isn't the designers' fault necessarily. They had their marching orders. Clearly, they were riffing off the early Ram heads from 1941, 1951, and the early 70's. And they had the marching orders to "update" it for the new stadium. I have to assume that with such a high-tech state-of-the-art stadium that the client wanted it to look sleek and modern. There had to be marching orders to bring in LA into the design for a host of reasons, I would speculate that it's cause they want to capture the regional aspects of the team to shed their St Louis past and create more permanence for the ID. This is just me speculating, cause of what they delivered.
So ultimately they did their job. And the decision-makers in the Rams organization are ultimately to blame for the final direction and the final results we see today.
Another point to make is that it is always more difficult to update or "improve" upon something iconic than it is to update or improve something that originally sucks. Take the Tampa Bay uniforms with that weird orange and the Errol Flynn guy with the knife in his smirking mouth. I mean anything they did would be 100x better. So they went traditional skull and crossbones jolly roger as oppose to the sissy pirate and then they took the colors from a traditional powerhouse -- the 49ers who were at the time the most successful team in the league -- and just darkened the colors. The uniforms looked great and nobody has missed those tangerine nightmares. Nobody had any issue with those changes and nobody wants to go back to that horrid losing tradition of the Errol Flynn style uniforms and logo.
Now with the Rams, they have to deal with altering what is arguably the most iconic and traditional football logo / helmet of all time. This makes it totally difficult. Cause if you change something slightly you run the risk that that slight change is what the client wants to keep, or what the fanbase loves and wants to keep. So it's far more difficult job. That is why there is such a backlash to this new concept, even though it keeps pretty close to the traditional Ram head logo we have seen being slightly updated over the course of decades.
So me personally, if it was my job to create the new brand ID I would have followed the same course of action this design team did. They were modernizing the traditional Ram logo for 2020 and beyond - and I would have followed that exact same course of action.
I mean, If you look at the 1944 Logo and today's new logo they are practically the same.
I think I would have just made the horns a bit thicker and done a slight modification on the 70's Ram head and called it a day.
But that clearly isn't what the client wanted.