In the last ten years, football has increasingly gained popularity in Budapest, Hungary. It is home to a twenty-team league with three divisions, with more than two thousand players. When two amateur football teams merged—the Cowboys and Rebels—Gyula Nemeth was hired to create the new logo. “The name Cowbells was decided by team management. I liked it from the beginning,” Nemeth says. “Football is a very serious sport, and I tend to like when a team, especially on the semipro level, doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
Nemeth, who has been working as a designer since 1999, has recently been focusing a lot of his logo work on illustrative faces and heads. When he ventures out, he tends to memorize interesting faces so he can sketch them when he returns home. “I love to capture characters and the variety of it. It’s just such a waste not to put an interesting face on paper,” he notes. “I’ve done hundreds of simple vector head illustrations over the last couple of years. It’s always fun to capture the likeness of somebody while simplifying the facial features until it’s just a few lines and shapes.”
His challenge with the Cowbell mascot was to convey something masculine and strong with a name that, quite frankly, doesn’t exude those characteristics. “The name itself is kind of neutral, but also funny because of the famous Saturday Night Live skit with the cowbell. I had to think about a mascot that conveys the basic characteristics of the sport—aggression, energy and power,” he explains.
“It’s always fun to design a logo for a team that doesn’t have a cliché name like Lions or Bears. The more abstract the name, the more fun to figure out how to communicate it in a logo.”
—Gyula Nemeth
Nemeth designed three logo designs for the Cowbells to use for different purposes. “The bull was an easy solution, so that became the primary logo, while the little cowbell with the C/R (for Cowboys/Rebels) became the secondary icon. The third one is a demon-like character who will serve as the mascot for the Cowbells fans,” he explains.
Nemeth did a series of sketches for the logo, experimenting with faces, forms and a bull. The previous Rebels logo was a profile of a man, shown left, so Nemeth wanted to include a man’s face in his sketches. “The long-haired guy was the first sketch, and it looked a bit like the comic book character Lobo,” he says. “The management didn’t really like that version, so I changed the composition and the hairstyle and it went through immediately.”
Since the previous names were Cowboys and Rebels, Nemeth wanted to incorporate characteristics from both in the new logo, but as he sketched, he realized it wouldn’t be that simple. “I thought it could be a guy in a cowboy hat with a handlebar moustache, similar to the old Rebels mascot that was based on György Dózsa, a Hungarian historical figure. But for new fans it would read only as a cowboy without any ‘rebel’ in it, so I decided to do two characters.”
He started by drawing different concepts for each character. The bull with a bell around its neck became the primary mascot, while a fierce-looking man holding a cowbell became a secondary icon. “The guy is a bit demonic but still human. I knew that even if I create a scary face, the cowbell will tone it down. It is a ridiculously peaceful object,” he says. The Cowbells typeface, Okie, designed by Kris Bazen, perfectly complements the edginess of the logo designs.
The new Cowbells logos have a strong presence in the league, compared to the competition. “Most of the team logos are designed by a player or a friend of the management, so they are pretty amateurish, which is common in smaller leagues around the globe, not just in Budapest,” Nemeth says.
I made two versions of this character for Ironhead, an apparel company in Canada. This head icon and a full-body nesting doll with a little boxing glove on her hand. Cute twist.
A T-shirt company contacted me with the idea of producing merchandise with Ditka’s iconic 1980s-style head on it. I guess licensing problems got in their way eventually, but I did some other head designs for the same company later on.
This illustration was made for a music magazine in Budapest called New Noise (it has since folded). I did several John Lennon heads with different hairstyles. This was one of my favorites.
The German hockey team Landshut Cannibals was playing with the idea of changing their identity a few years ago. Unfortunately, they changed their mind after I designed a few options for them—a sad story of a potentially successful logo not used. This is still one of my favorite head designs, and several future clients worked with me because of this particular piece.
This is a personal piece. I have always liked the works of Spike Lee, and after watching some old Nike commercials with his character Mars Blackmon, I suddenly felt the urge to draw him.
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