Lance Wyman is among America’s greatest-ever graphic designers, and his fingerprints are all over any number of American cities.
Wyman’s style is instantly recognizable – simple, bold and clever. Wyman often works in wayfaring, and his signs and instructions to viewers often use simple, geometric shapes to get the job done, often incorporating a playfulness as well. His approach has made his work timeless. In 2011, when the government of the District of Columbia wanted their metro map updated, they went right back to Wyman, who had crafted the original design for the system about 40 years earlier.
His most notable work, though, came early on in his career. In the late 60s, Wyman, along with a handful of others, was tasked with creating the visual identity for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Mexico City. It was a massive task, especially for a young designer only a half-decade removed from college.
Determined to get the assignment right, Wyman moved to Mexico in the months leading up to his deadline and immersed himself in the country’s culture. He dived into archives, visited archaeological sites and spoke to locals. Slowly, he started to pick up design cues – from the yarn paintings of the indigenous Huichol in western Mexico, to the Aztec stone carvings that have always helped define the country’s visual identity.
What Wyman helped produce is almost universally recognized as one of the greatest assemblages of sports design ever created. The logotype for the tournament alone – that hypnotic, concentric “MEXICO 1968” – blended the country’s culture with the Op Art movement of the time. Wyman and his team created event posters, wayfaring signage and more and within years their designs dotted the landscape of the entire city.
In 1970, when the country hosted its first-ever World Cup, they went right back to Wyman’s logotype, and Wyman himself created a handful of other designs for the tournament. It feels fair to say that the visual identity of that tournament may well be the most instantly-recognizable design work of any World Cup in history.
I reached Wyman a couple of years ago, at his office in New York City. Then 86, his work had understandably slowed. The World Cup is returning to Mexico in 2026, and I was eager to gather his thoughts on some of the early designs associated with the tournament, particularly Fifa’s official World Cup logo.
“I did see it, yes,” Wyman said back then. “It’s not that effective. It’s not really identifiable when it goes small, so that’s certainly a problem. It certainly doesn’t say ‘soccer.’ I remember the first time I saw the (European) Champions League logo, I thought that was pretty clever. This … I’m just not so sure there’s a lot you can do with it.”
The logo felt phoned-in back then, as it does now. It was crafted by Fifa’s in-house design team and accompanied by the requisite explainer graphic and even a presentation by Fifa itselfwho espoused its valors: scalability and adaptability. It’s less a logo and more of a logo system, they explained, allowing them to adapt the image to different devices and even alter it to suit different host cities in the tournament’s host countries. It’s the same thing Wyman did expertly in 68, just worse.
My view, of course, is purely subjective – as are most things related to art and design. But looking at the logo got me thinking more broadly about the direction of crests and design as a whole in American soccer.
More recently, the crest for Denver Summit FC – the NWSL’s latest expansion club, which will debut in 2026 – only intensified what I’d already been thinking: why do these things all look the same in recent years? And despite that, why are some so inspiring, and some so … bland?
In some ways, Vermont-based designer Matthew Wolff holds the keys to the design direction of American club soccer. His work spans the entirety of the men’s and women’s game, having handled some of MLS’ most well-received crests, elegant designs for LAFC and NYCFC among them. In the NWSL, Wolff was most recently tapped to craft a new logo for the club now known as Boston Legacy (after that club rolled out maybe the most roundly criticized name and brand in American soccer history.
His work dots the lower leagues as well, where several of his crests have felt like instant classics – Union Omaha, and even recent USL League 2 champions Vermont Green, a club Wolff helped co-found.
“I was at the right place at the right time,” said Wolff. “I think about the trajectory of American soccer in parallel to where I was in my education and my early career. (Everybody) has known that American soccer was going to explode for years and years. So I think I somewhat intentionally positioned myself to be ready, willing and able to create football crests in the United States.”
Wolff’s works sometimes feels a little bit like Lyman’s: uncluttered, bold, simple. Like Wyman did in ‘68, Wolff operates in a space where his work often ends up being representative of the community that commissioned it and he often incorporates elements of those places into his final design.
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That’s easy enough to see in NYCFC’s crest, which looks like an old subway token, or the crest that Wolff designed for the NWSL’s Gotham FC, which prominently features the Statue of Liberty. Others feel a lot more esoteric, like the crest Wolff crafted for USL’s One Knox FC. That one, which features a color palette inspired by a handful of Knoxville’s local monuments, feels distinctly more generic, as does Denver’s.
It’s an aesthetic summed up on a podcast I heard recently. In it, the host was raving about Denver’s new crest, saying it would feel right at home on the side of a reusable metal water bottle. To that person, that was a compliment. At times, though, that type of ubiquity can rob a design of its character.
Wolff himself acknowledges the reality of design work as a whole. His job is done for the client, to meet the needs of their brief, not necessarily his own tastes or preferences.
“My ideal vision is kind of irrelevant to these crests,” says Wolff. “I’m trying to answer a brief, some parameters that have been set by a club or by me and the club together. There’s obviously an infinite number of ways you can execute it, even in the tightest of briefs. If you told me ‘OK, this crest needs to have a heraldic lion that’s blue, and be in a circle and say Chelsea at the top and Football Club at the bottom and have some ornaments … there are still infinite ways I can design that. I don’t really think about my own tastes in the crests as much as ‘is this answering the brief.”
Designers, in other words, are only part of the equation these days in terms of crafting a brand identity.
“[The process] has been pulled away from graphic designers – specialists – and pulled into this nebulous room of other people who make design decisions by committee,” said Ben Mahler, a former creative director at MLS club DC United. “Marketing directors, focus groups, analytics driven shit, it all ends up pushing things into safer territory. It’s losing the artistic side and the wonkiness that comes from an individual.”
Wolff, and any other designer in this space, is also subject to the mercy of the audience, so to speak. Bos Nation is far from the only club to have course corrected after an initial misstep – when the Chicago Fire rolled out an absolutely atrocious rebrand in 2019, their fans were enraged. The Fire turned to Wolff to solve that problem, and he did so with a much cleaner, easier-to look at design.
“These designs are meant to represent the fans and the club,” said Wolff. “And if the fans, or the community see this crest and they feel it doesn’t represent them, then I think they’re well within their rights to let the club know. These fans are the ones who the clubs are asking to buy a $100 kit. And sure, there are examples where people make comments (about a crest) that are a little ridiculous. But by and large, I get it.”
For his part, Wyman, who grew up in Kearny, New Jersey (an American soccer holy land in and of itself) told me he’s never been asked to do a soccer crest. A few years back he partnered with a non-profit to help design a soccer ballwhich turned out great: the red, blue and white design is bedecked with stars. It feels a bit like the design of the old North American Soccer League’s ball, used through the ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Outside that, Wyman’s work has largely been done for companies and local municipalities. Looking at his designs, it’s hard to imagine why some club out there wouldn’t bring him into the fold. Wolff’s work is often fantastic, but some variety might be nice, too. Maybe some club out there could take a chance on the person whose designs have been thrown on nearly every logo-related mood board in existence, over the years.
“Every once in a while something will come along with sports, but for the most part, my work has been focused elsewhere,” Wyman said a couple of years back. “I’d love to take a crest on, if I had the opportunity.”
