Street Fighter 6 and the art of a bad logo

 You need a new logo? Give me 30 seconds in Adobe...

It's hard to pick out a current, active, and beloved franchise that goes back as far as Street Fighter does. All the way back to the early days in the arcade, defining the competitive fighting genre for decades to come with the introduction of combos in 1991's Street Fighter II, to the absolute apex of the franchise bar none; the Jean Claude Van Damme movie. (Obviously.) It's a franchise with countless entries and a whole much-beloved cross-over sub-franchise with Marvel that I absolutely forgot about until I sat down to write this blog. (To think, only Street Fighter and Fortnite have had the honour of crossing over with Marvel. At least until Kingdom Hearts 4 comes out.) And in all that time never once has anyone really sat back and looked at that largely unmolested series logo. You know, the aggressive font, the loud colours, the uniform layering. I wonder why that is?

"Well" you're probably thinking "Because Street Fighter as a franchise benefits minimally from how the logo is typed out. It's just fodder for the front box, who cares?" And you would be absolutely right in every point. It is just front box fodder and totally inconsequential to what makes a good Street Fighter game, we don't even think about how the logo looks. Unless the game decides to advertise itself and other products during the loading screens between matches, but that's a whole other bag of worms I don't even want to get into right now. But what if we did? What would it take for players to revolt in disgust at the title of the game regardless of whether or not we'd actually seen gameplay? What sort of butchering would need to be done from the design team and who would be insane enough to even attempt to do this? Well the current team helming Street Fighter 6, it would seem; because someone up in the design chair bit the forbidden fruit and shot it right through their intestines onto the marketing slides for all of us to gawk at. Yes, the rumours are true: the Street Fighter 6 logo sucks.

But why does it suck so much? Afterall we've all accepted the fact that a logo is nothing, garnishing on top of the steroid pie. Oh, and Capcom's designers seem to have a fetish for overly beefed-up men, we noticed it in the ugly redesigns of 'Marvel Versus Capcom: Infinite', the hilarious brick-form of Chris in 'Resident Evil: Village' and now the overly muscled Ryu of Street Fighter 6. It's like they hired a child to update all their characters into being the most 'manly' iterations that their underdeveloped minds can conjure up. Maybe that was the start of it, just seeing their deformed Ryu from this trailer put everyone on their guard as they realised "hang on, something's up here!"; only for the title reveal to knock them over and send their world into a tizzy. Yes, I have to say I think the Ryu butchering plays at least 30% of the role when it comes to decipher the fan backlash here. 

Let's ask ourselves for a moment; what is a title supposed to convey? Well on the surface level it has to be eye-catching, stand out on the shelf and against it's peers and look professional enough to subconsciously convince the potential customer that this is a product worth taking seriously, and thus buying. Delve a little bit deeper and we can deduce that the spirit of the game should reflect the choice of colours, sizing and font. The title itself needs to be legible and distinct so that it sticks in the minds of players and, once again, stands out. One could argue that the intricacies of this processes become less important as the series itself grows bigger and the reputation of those games takes on a life of it's own. Call of Duty can happily slap the abbreviation COD on it's box without anyone making the most passing comparison to fish. (Amazingly they never have, but they could) Maybe that exception is what Street Fighter is counting on.

Because as you've likely seen, the Street Fighter 6 logo is... let's say 'minimalist'. Whereas the logo of old was impact-driven, yellow hued with explosive red and white, and typically scratchy and sharp in the tips of each letter; this is a hexagon with the letters 'SF' balanced in it and a slapdash '6' literally plastered in the corner ontop of everything else. There's no denying it; it looks amateur. Graphic designers have come out to draw a comparison between this design and an SF pre-packaged logo on the Adobe Stock Image store which was apparently used as the logo for a French Sci-Fi convention called SF Connexion. You can compare the two logos, remove the 6, and certainly find more than a few similarities.

Of course there are differences, to be sure. The hexagon border has some applied wear and paint smudge to give it a moth-eaten, graffiti look and a few of the uniformly sharp edges of the convention's logo have been smoothed into round curves. Also, the F has been angled downwards in the Street Fighter logo, to further give into the subtle illusion that the logo is embossed or protruding from the middle. It's slight perspective work, very nice. But of course I'm picking at any straw I can find here, the designs are near-identical to one another. The S even features an identical and atypical serif tail in it's type- there's no doubt that one came from the other. If you are a believer, choosing this hill to be your Waterloo, you might have to fall back on the 'it's just an S and an F in a shape; there's only so many ways that configuration of characters can come out, there was bound to be crossover!' Which is true to a point. I think the small details tell a much more intentional story here, and even regardless of intent or not, maybe the generic-nature of the logo is a symptom of the problem!

We'll go back and confer with our stipulations. Is this eye-catching? Not really, it's uniform and bland with a colour scheme of white on grey that might as well melt into the wall. Is it professional? Nope. The design lacks any character or individuality and comes off more as an algorithm generated stock asset- because it pretty much is. Does it reflect the tone of the game? Well that is pretty much a 'wait and see' affair. Street Fighter is usually hand-in-hand with flamboyant and loud stages that take place all across the world and are bathed in explosive, not bloody, violence. This logo tells of a more subdued, realist, street-vibe which is trying to meld with the hip-hop track in the trailer; it certainly isn't indicative of Street Fighter's past, but we'll see how it fares in it's present and future. And is it legible and distinct? Honestly no. The SF abbreviation does not conjure 'Street Fighter' at a glance, the font is a rip-off and if I saw this on a poster I'd have to make the concerted mental leap to associate it with the product. So on nearly every level; I'd call this logo an absolute failure of design and intent.

Now does this mean the game itself is going to suck? No. It probably just means that one of the producers had a kid who wanted to buff up their design portfolio before entering college and so his daddy got him a gig designing for an ultra popular games franchise. That is my best guess for what happened here and I think it's decently believable. We're still in the teaser stages for Street Fighter right now, which means there's plenty of time to quietly shuffle this off and get something more in spirit of the game in. Although, nowadays games companies do have excessively hard times admitting to their mistakes and often posses themselves with a fatalistic hubris that demands they ride each decision until it's bitter demise, so maybe this is the next Street Fighter logo which is going to be printed on all the boxes. If so, then we can chalk this marketing blunder up as another victim of the excessively unnecessary corporate logo redesign age.