The greenest team in esports now has the perfect logo

For the last year, FlyQuest has been on a mission. Though the team competes in the League of Legends Championship Series, it has steadily become as known for its socially conscious efforts as its in-game performances. The team launched initiatives centered on planting trees, donating to a coral reef foundation, and improving mental health. But for FlyQuest CEO Tricia Sugita, the process was always a bit incomplete. “While we were doing those actions, a part of it always felt missing,” she tells The Verge. “Because what was lagging behind was our design.”

Today, FlyQuest is revealing a brand-new logo meant to invoke its focus on everything green. It’s a fairly simple design: a straightforward “Q” with a leaf in the middle. Despite this simplicity, the rebranding has been in the works for quite a while. Sugita says the team started thinking about it toward the end of 2019 and then spent most of 2020 and early 2021 smoothing things out. The team partnered with designer Clara Nguyen to create the logo.

One of the main goals was to create a sense of permanence. While FlyQuest’s overall image received a green makeover last year, Sugita wanted to ensure that it was clear that wasn’t just a whim. “Now it’s official. Now this is what you can expect from FlyQuest forever,” she says. It’s something that has helped the team differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded field, where most esports teams center their image on competition or style. “It was already a big step as an esports organization to say that this is our company vision,” Sugita explains. “That’s so rare on its own.”

FlyQuest’s old logo featured a lot of straight lines and hard edges, which is something the team wanted to get away from. The color palette has also been simplified from green and gold to a primary green. “I wanted something that was more rounded and soft,” Sugita says. “It feels welcoming, inviting, wholesome, all of those things it brings you. [The old logo] did have boldness that I appreciated, but it was just too sharp and edgy. If you get those shapes right, it becomes inclusive, and that’s really what I’m trying to go for.”

Despite the long process, Sugita says the redesign went fairly smoothly. After spending some time learning about FlyQuest and the team’s vision, Nguyen originally designed six different options, all of which included a big Q with either a sun or leaf featured prominently. From there, it was narrowed down to two options, which included the final design. Sugita believes that the process was so straightforward because the team knew what they wanted and spent time to clearly articulate that to Nguyen. “I felt like she could understand the heart and soul and intention behind it,” Sugita explains.

Often, these kinds of big redesigns — whether it’s in esports, traditional sports, or elsewhere — come as a shock to fans, who don’t like to see their favorite team suddenly change. But FlyQuest’s rebranding has been much more gradual than most. The new logo isn’t coming out of nowhere; it’s following what could almost be described as a soft-launch period, which also included some unique jersey designs, featuring everything from jellyfish to honeycomb patterns. After a year like that, a green leaf logo fits right in. “Who else uses flowers, and bees, and cute turtles?” asks Sugita. “We do.”