San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SPURS LOGO
the “sig” or logo.
“It could be up in the corner. It could be down at the bottom. I could do it a thousand ways, because they never told me to put the (spur) where it is. It could have been anywhere,” Collins said.
Collins spent two days sketching ideas then submitted three designs. He drew everything by hand, including the Spurs typeface, which he created as a bold 3D text.
Of the three proposals, only one featured a spur for a “u” in the team name. And the artist was sure McCombs would pick it.
“Everything went so smooth with the Spurs that I think I read his mind,” Collins said.
McCombs and Spurs management approved Collins’ design in a single meeting with no changes. Start to finish, the Spurs logo was developed in less than four days.
When it came time to finalize the logo, Collins already was working on another project, so he asked Pitluk artist Bob Welch to make the Spurs sig camera-ready. Welch retraced and finished the logo in black and white, much like an inker finalizes a penciler’s drawings in comic books.
“Because I was the creator, I get the credit,” Collins said. “But I want you to know that Bob Welch was also a part of that.”
The Spurs have tweaked the main logo over the years, most notably in the 1990s, when swaths of teal, pink and yellow were added behind it. It returned to just silver and black in the early 2000s. Yet the franchise has always stuck with the classic spur design.
David Gallardo, owner of Luna Creative in San Antonio, has done design work for other big San Antonio names such as H-E-B, Santikos Entertainment and USAA. He lauded the Spurs logo for its effective simplicity and credited its constancy to the team’s fans.
“The less you have to memorize, the more memorable something becomes,” Gallardo said. “There’s this very powerful statement it makes by being simple. Just clever enough, but not over-complicated.
“In terms of its longevity, I’m going to attribute that more towards the community that stands behind it. Really it would be the people of San Antonio who carry a lot of pride in our city and in our team that gives it its longevity.”
Collins’ logo work goes well beyond the Spurs.
After joining Pitluk in 1953, he worked his way up from what he called “a peon doing paste-up” to senior art director before retiring in 1988. Along the way, he helped design the main brochure for HemisFair ’68 and the logo for La Quinta Inns & Suites, which opened its first hotel that same year right across the street from the World’s Fair. Collins also designed logos for Market Square and Zachry Construction.
But corporate branding is just part of his repertoire.
In 1963, the San Antonio native founded the Watercolor Gang, a group of Alamo City artists who traveled together to capture far-flung outdoor scenes on canvas. Those painting excursions started with a trip to Big Bend and went on to include the south of France, the Thames and other locales, according to a 2013 ExpressNews story.
San Antonio artist Nellie Gill has known Collins since the early 1980s, when she first took watercolor lessons from him at the Jewish Community Center. She said Collins’ skills with a brush range from realistic to stylistic, and that such talent served him well in designing the Spurs logo.
“I don’t think anyone but Finis could have come up with that design for the Spurs,” Gill said. “I think that’s a history to be remembered.”
Collins says he’s just honored he did the work and feels like he did his best.
“I’m behind the Spurs,” Collins said with a laugh. “I was always behind them.”
And clearly in front of them, too.