Oh boy! I have been waiting for the opportunity to write this article for a long time. Welcome to the beginning of my series on the best and worst of scratchy band logos. This summarizes the months (day?) I spent researching and analyzing what makes a good scratchy logo, and what does not. Scholarly sources were scoured and myspace pages were loaded and unloaded with a frequency that would intimidate someone whose full time job involves loading and unloading (like moving men or male porn stars).

To keep the integrity of the exercise intact, I tried to select only bands that play some type of core music because the scratchy band logo, or at least the term ‘scratchy band logo,’ seems to apply mostly to them. Perhaps in the future I will apply the same concept to death and black metal logos. Also I felt that it would be much easier to shamelessly rip on bands that I don’t enjoy (Spoiler alert! Oceano‘s logo is TERRIBLE!).

Before I begin, let me first state that I have never created a band logo like these, and I probably wouldn’t be very good at it if I did. Illustration is not my strong suit. To be honest most of my criticism of the letterforms in the logos is coming from my background in graffiti, and I wasn’t very good at that either. But don’t let my shortfalls ruin the fun. If you can’t do then teach, and if you can’t teach, then mercilessly criticize.

In the first installment (out of four I’m thinking), I’m going to start with the bad, but not the most baddest. That way I can test the waters to see if my opinions result in an inbox filled with death threats. It will also give the chance for any patrons of HeavyBlog to suggest bands that I may have missed so that I can check them out and possibly include them in a later article in the series.

As with music, art and life itself, there is a lot more bad than good, so here goes. These are the worst scratchy band logos numbers 10 through 6.

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10. UPON A BURNING BODY

I enjoy the left half of this logo very much. ‘Upon’ is dynamic, full of action and kind of quirky. ‘Burning’ feels the same way. It’s like the designer thought the band was called Upon Burning until the lead singer called him and was like “dude, you need to read the emails we send you.” What I’m trying to say is that the “A Body” portion of the logo falls flat on it’s face. The designer probably felt guilty about making such a huge boner, so they did a little extra work and added the weird goat/ram/cow skull. It took a few views before I realized it was actually supposed to be a skull. Before that, it always looked like a man hunched over spreading his tentacle arms, which would have been cooler. I think the inclusion of shading for the skull’s eyes would have gone a long way toward making it actually look like a skull.

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