Mixed Martial Arts has in recent years tried hard to be taken as a serious worldwide sport in line with the sport’s sudden popularity growth. As a part of this new professional image every promotion is striving for, they have each left behind the more complicated 3d logos for the more modern style of simple 2d logos with a focus on legibility.
This is good for me in two ways, it is easier to make an effect but simplistic logo for my project and also it will allow the logo to look professional in front of any investors I may be pitching my idea too.
Fig 1. Rizin Fighting Federation Logo 
Fig 2. One Championship Logo 
Fig 3. UFC Logo 
Fig.4 Bellator MMA logo 
Fig.5 Bellator MMA Logo 2
I quite like the Bellator logo in particular as it can be used as both a square design (Fig.4) and stretched out to make a header logo (Fig.5). This would be nice as official documents could have the horizontal logo as a header or the square logo in a corner of the page. Also, while this design is still flat and simple, giving it legibility. It does include the nice detail of the spartan helmet in profile, this is a nice subtle touch, but I feel it really helps make the company image stand out more than other logos where it is literally just the name of the company. By using something like a spartan helmet but making the design subtle its obvious to the viewer that the company is occupied with some kind of masculine occupation.
:: My Design ::
I wanted to use heavy, masculine fonts for the logo as that is something present across the logos of all the large MMA promotions. I used two fonts, both of which were found on dafont. Naturally as I would be using these fonts in a commercial setting, I would need to contact the copyright holders of these font and pay for the right or ask for permission to use the fonts.
Fig. 6 Logo font 1 
Fig. 7 Logo font 2 
Fig 8. Octagon reference
I did also use a reference to give me a nice birds eye view of an octagon, however I did change these significantly so shouldn’t run into any issues with copyright with this part of the design. Overall, I like my design however, I felt like I needed to add a solid colouring to the background in order for the logo to look professional when presented on a video game introduction screen.
Fig.9 
Fig.10 
Fig.11 
Fig.12 (my steel texture) 
Fig.13 (sourced steel texture) 
Fig.14 (final logo design)
I wanted to use a steel texture to fill in the background in order to both make the logo more legible and help brand the title. I did start with my own image of a steel texture (fig.12) however found it didn’t look distinct when cut out to the size I needed (fig.11). so I found an image of a brushed aluminium texture (fig.13) which was notably steel even when shrunk to the size needed for my logo.
References:
Creativemarket.com (n.d.) [Pinterest]. Available online: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/376824693820855671/ [accessed 15/10/2021]
Digital Graphic Labs (2005) (Custom Font). [dafont.com]. Available online: https://www.dafont.com/gun-metal.font [Accessed 10/10/2021]
@RizinFighting [Twitter Account Image]. Available online: https://twitter.com/rizinfighting [Accessed 09/10/2021]
Logos-World.net (2021) UFC-Logo (Online Article) Available online: https://logos-world.net/ufc-logo/ [Accessed 09/10/2021]
Mmafont (2012) (Custom Font). [dafont.com]. Available online: https://www.dafont.com/dream-mma.font [Accessed 10/10/2021]
molaruso (n.d.) [Online Product]. (Pixers.uk). Available online: https://pixers.uk/pillow-covers/background-with-circular-metal-brushed-texture-48493713 [Accessed 17/10/2021]
Wikipedia [online Image]. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONE_Championship [Accessed 09/10/2021]
Worldmmaawards.com (n.d) [Webpage] Available online: https://www.worldmmaawards.com/mma-awards/page/7/ [Accessed 09/10/2021]