GANG GREEN'S NEW YELLOWS.(football fans react to New York Jets's experiments with colors and logos)(Brief Article)

One recent morning, Jay Cross, the president of the New York Jets, was sitting in the Jets' new Manhattan office, in a former Prada showroom on West Fifty-seventh Street. Some walls still bore the mint-green paint of the previous tenants, but the artificial turf in the reception area was the proper green--hunter green, Jets green. Cross, a graduate of Columbia's architecture school and a self-described design junkie, was discussing his campaign to revamp the team's graphics and to introduce Jets fans to good design--a treacherous undertaking, like trying to foist helmets and shoulder pads on the Kirov Ballet. "I'd say that eighty per cent of our fans don't care about design," Cross said. "The rest are at least aware of it--or willing to look the other way to enjoy the sporting event. Our intention is to come up with something that does not offend that eighty per cent, which is a subliminal exercise. It's a tough crowd."

Last August, the Jets launched a new Web site, with help from Pentagram, a design firm that Cross hired "to expand the visual presentation of the team" without altering the original logo or the green-and-white color scheme. "Jets green is hunter. We never considered depriving anyone of that," Michael Bierut, a Pentagram partner, said. "But the Jets were sort of being crushed by tradition. You can only do one thing with hunter, which is to print it on white. It's like trying to write a story with only words that begin with 's.' So we wondered, 'What if the Jets owned all greens?' We redesigned the site, introducing a little bit of yellow to the greens, and people went ape-shit."

Fan protest poured in to the site: "I detest the color scheme. . . . I want Jet green!!!" "This is FOOTBALL for god's sake, not the Gay Pride Parade." "Some genius gets paid big bucks for this?"

"When the site went up, we were too extreme with the colors," Cross said. "So we've backed away. If you get a haircut and no one notices, then it's a good haircut."

Herman Edwards, the Jets' head ...