The 2012-2013 Swarthmore Earthworms. Photo credit: G. Temple Price. Screenprinted jerseys and shorts by Five Ultimate.
Every two years, my college ultimate frisbee team orders new jerseys. My junior year, I designed a new logo for the team. The previous logo was a cartoonish graphic of an earthworm wrapped around a disc. My goals were to simplify the logo to a single color, maintain the elements of the earthworm and disc, and make the logo as abstract and iconic as possible while still remaining recognizable.
The old logo. The designer is unknown to me.
As part of my Modern Architecture class the previous semester, we discussed urban planning. I was particularly taken by Ildefons Cerdà's Eixample in Barcelona. I found the chamfered square shape of the street blocks to be interesting and thought it could be incorporated into a segment motif, which would be useful for an abstract earthworm design. I played around with this shape in Adobe Illustrator until I settled on a single segment that I liked. I also began designing a matching typeface to use for numbers and names on the jerseys but did not like the end product.
I hoped to incorporate some ouroboros imagery into the logo. However, this design was too abstract and decoupled from the symbols of the earthworm and frisbee disc.
The non-segmented section of this image is known as the clitellum. It is a key part of making a collection of shapes seem worm-like.
I added a tail to the design to underscore the worm-like nature of the segmented section.
The near-final design, which narrowed the width of the segments and accentuated the tail.
Final design for the 2013 Swarthmore Earthworms logo.