When the Buffalo Bulls take to the gridiron on Thursday, new head coach Turner Gill will not be the only debut. Thursday will also mark the premiere of the Bulls new logo and football uniforms in action.
Instead of the customary Bulls head, the new logo features a full body design of a bull. Athletic Director Warde Manuel believes this new logo represents the University and the athletic department in a better fashion.
"I think what we tried to do with the new logo is be bold and aggressive in terms of the style," Manuel said. "What makes it bold more then anything is not just the head and the ferociousness of the horns, but the fact that it's such a large animal as well. Incorporating the body as opposed to just the head will bring back that completeness to the animal."
This new logo, which was designed primarily by UB Creative Services and lead designer Allen Kegler, is meant to tie together the university's name with the picture of the bull. Manuel says that the old logo, which had been used since 1996, failed in this respect.
"We want the logo and the name to be synonymous, where as with the old bull head we had University at Buffalo on top of it," Manuel said. "That's why we went into it (designing the new logo). We were looking at how to take the logo we had, and put more work marks around it. At the time I said, 'why don't we look at the design of the logo itself, and what about incorporating the body?'"
Along with the new logo, the football team received new helmets. When Manuel interviewed for the job at Buffalo, he noted that the old helmets were too generic and failed to make a statement about the university.
"The helmet was an issue in that when I first looked at it when I was being interviewed I didn't know what it was," Manuel said. "As a representation of the university you want to have people recognize what's on your helmet. If you play football, the biggest component of the helmet and the logo that's on the helmet is the recognition of it. When I first looked at the helmet while I was interviewing, I didn't have a sense for what institution it was. It's not that the design on itself was bad, it's just that if you put it side to side with a bunch of other helmets, you wouldn't have known."
Though Manuel knew from the beginning that he would like to change the helmets, the process from start to finish took over five months to complete. The athletic department tested different designs with focus groups consisting of university faculty members, students and alumni.
"With the new logo it was really a five to six month work in progress," Manuel said. "It wasn't something that we jumped in right off the bat. It was something that we wanted to do a really good job on. We pulled some students together at the end of last year and we sat down with them and got a chance for some students to give us feedback on what we were doing, and what they thought. They felt that when they looked at them side by side the one with the body was a better representation of the university and what we were trying to do."
One reason why many professional and collegiate teams change their logos is to boost merchandise sales. This was also true for the Bulls.
"The first week that we had it up for sale on our website, we matched the sales that we would usually do over a Christmas holiday," Manuel said. "We were really pleased with how people gravitated towards it."
With the new logo and the new era of football ushered in by Gill, Manuel hopes that the University community will proudly show their support of not only the athletic department but for the school as a whole.
"The more that we have success athletically, the more it will drive people to want to wear it," Manuel said. "We want our students, our faculty, our staff, to be proud of what we accomplish, and to wear not only things with our logo on it but things that represent the University at Buffalo."
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
