slapshot

There's different meaning in the 2 logos. The "before" version has him with a barrel, likely filled with rum. He's ready to party! The "after" version shows him with a treasure chest. Not specifically alcohol-related.

The font is a bit too light for the team/city name, and white text almost gets lost in the brightness of the gradient.

EDIT: White on gold is practically illegible.  Really needs to be darker.

On 1/15/2024 at 3:19 PM, The_Admiral said:

I think it's difficult for an entire network to tie itself to one color for its brand--you'll notice that CBS, Fox, and ABC do not (though ABC did flirt with yellow for a while in the late '90s/early 2000s), and NBC uses all six. Fortunately for the CW, they're not an entire network. I thought the eye-catching green suited them well as an unconventional, risk-taking, youth-oriented "network," but I don't think orange by itself is as effective. Dropping the "The" makes sense since it was just a weird vestige of "the WB." Here's to this next chapter of the Columbia-Warner, which is not a The, and which I believe is no longer majority-owned by CBS or by Warner.

 

Incidentally, I'm just starting Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN, albeit in odious e-book form. I'll share my thoughts when I have them.

PBS is usually blue. The Fox brand changes color depending on use. For the Fox Network itself, while the wordmark itself is usually white, their website favicon has it inside a light blue square. Fox News and Fox Weather logos have it set in blue, with Fox News also adding red. Fox Sports has the logo in either white or dark blue.

Aside from the NBC logo, the only other network I know that consistently uses a color is ESPN (red).

On 12/5/2023 at 1:36 PM, FiddySicks said:

Welp, my town got an ECHL team and the entire venture is already an enormous disaster. They announced the new name yesterday and it’s a travesty. 
 

They picked Knight Monsters
 

Dog:censored: name and people are furious. I live about a mile from the new arena and I won’t go to a single game even if offered free tickets. We’re in Sharks territory, this town HATES Vegas, and a group of outsiders with zero connection to the area (including Tim Tebow who’s one of my least favorite people on the planet) picked something that sucks the d**ks of our biggest rival city. Oh, and tickets are like three times the price of most other teams in the league and the new venue has zero parking. What a half brained mess concocted by a group of huge morons. Thankfully this thing will fold mid season because the logistics of housing everyone in Reno and trying to drive to South Lake just for games is lunacy. 

The AHL came to my area (Lowell, Mass.) back in 1998, a city only 25 miles northwest of Boston, deep in Bruins territory. The team was named LockMonsters (referring to the city's canals filled with rusted shopping carts and used hypodermic needles), and the team's affiliations were, in order: NY Islanders, Islanders/Kings, Hurricanes, and Hurricanes/Flames, before switching team name and affiliation to the Devils. Aside from the first season, attendance rarely reached 1500-2000 per game. The team learned that the only non-Bruins hockey drawing fans in this area was UMass-Lowell in Hockey East, a D1 college conference. Yet the AHL still lasted in Lowell for 11 years.

This area was saturated with AHL hockey for a 15+ year span from the late 90s through 2010s. There were actually 4 teams within an hour of Boston (Lowell, Manchester, Worcester, Providence), 7 if you expand to 2 hours (Springfield, Hartford, Portland). Only one of them was a Bruins affiliate – Providence. Today, only Providence, Hartford and Springfield remain in the AHL. Portland and Worcester have ECHL teams. Manchester is basically tenantless, while Lowell has UMass-Lowell (Hockey East) and will be hosting the PWHL Boston franchise.

It seems most redesigns are on the same page. Here is one (shameless plug) I put together about three years ago, using the updated ram horn on the helmet and sleeve, but moving the numbers to the shoulders. Colors are back to royal and yellow-gold.

5 minutes ago, tBBP said:

 

It may also be because [it looks like] that jersey is unbuttoned, thus making the NOB/number appear smaller. 

 

But even taking that into consideration, those NOB glyphs do look a little thinner than the average...

I think it was mentioned in Uni Watch that names are a little smaller.  MLB team lettering has never been a consistent size across all teams, so by making it more uniform in height and weight, the arch can be flatter, reducing the chance that longer names will stretch armpit to armpit. Unless Simeon Woods Richardson gets traded to Texas.

I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said. I've been following on Instagram and you've knocked it out of the park with this series. My favorite is Barrow - so fun and exponentially better than the existing version.

While I don't think every logo update has been a significant improvement, you've done a great job of simplifying what had excessive colors/gradients/outlines. The fonts are a bit too consistent though...in a vacuum they look good, but seeing them all series-wide I think you could use a little more variety.

For Featherstone - the original crest had a top hat, but you removed it for your version. Did it hold any significance? Maybe there's a way to keep it in there somewhere while still keeping the cleaned-up look?

For Hull, I really like the original - I think they had a very creative way of making a negative space sparrow head within a crown, so you had a challenge to improve on it.

Caught the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh ACC game on the CW. They are using ESPN's graphics. Although that may be an ACC thing, I think ESPN runs the ACC Network.

7 minutes ago, tBBP said:

Add this one to the ranks: I was out in Albuquerque New Mexico a couple days ago and, for some reason as yet unidentified by mankind, one of the sporting goods stores out there had a hat basket chock full of Indiana Pacers caps...

Reminds me of the time I was walking through the sporting goods department of a Boston-area Target, and in the middle of the all the Red Sox/Celtics/Patriots t-shirts was one for Elon University.

Aside from the giant ARIZONA, they're not horrible. Definitely an improvement over the last set, although the team name in the sleeve stripes isn't great. Names seem really big, should have used the condensed font Nike uses for many college teams. Number font is ok, it's almost what they're using now.

8 hours ago, Gary said:

 

Seeing this going round the interwebs, it’s a great logo, however I prefer the current logo. Would look great if another Lions team came along

This only works if the logo is always facing to the right.

9 hours ago, DCarp1231 said:

I know it says “INDIANA” but with the checkered pattern in the I, it reads as just “NDIANA” to me.

Thicken the stroke of the I to match the other one. Even the cap logo is a bit more bold.

Very fun series! One comment - for the Indiana hat, maybe use the checkerboard on the left side of the letter? On the right side, it almost makes the I look like an E. Also, with the italicized letter, putting checkerboards on the left side make it look like it just went past the finish line and is therefore the winner. Maybe even use that same I/checkerboard logo to start the team script on the jersey and tie them both in together.

18 hours ago, the admiral said:

I wouldn't modernize it with the most 1997-ass font in the book (well that or Matrix)

I don't think the 2021 ASG package looked dated. And if it all looked modern enough in 2021, why not 2024? It would certainly look more timeless than whatever Arizona is doing.

27 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

The Rockies should ditch the black entirely and go with a color scheme similar to Kansas State. Let the purple be the primary color and use silver and white as the accent colors. Absolutely no rhyme or reason as to why they went with black as the primary other than they wanted to

be yet another team on that popular early 90s black and silver bandwagon, and they probably do it worse than any other team. 
 

Dark green would’ve been a better choice, and the All Star Game they hosted in the late 90s showed that. 

The Rockies should own purple. Black is ok as a trim, but they should be primarily purple and silver, like K-State. They should also update their wordmarks - the inline font treatment is very dated, and it's really weak-looking from a distance, especially with the pinstripes. I think a modernization using Friz Quadrata (the same font used in the 2021 MLB ASG logos) would be a huge improvement.

Pepsi has always had a bit of an identity crisis for the last 40+ years. Ever since they dropped that beautiful script, they've struggled to find a good consistent combination of bottle cap / yin-yang / smile and name. Sometimes the name was inside the ballmark, other times on top of it, most recently next to it. And they've always tried to use trendy fonts. This version comes back a bit full-circle since the late 60s version, including the use of black for the name.

Is it great? No, but it's a much needed improvement for keep the brand consistent across all varieties. Coca-Cola got it right with their recent branding, and Pepsi was always playing catch-up to match a strong brand.

Doesn't make it taste better, though.

Overall, it's a stronger brand than the existing one, but the Waka/Macron looks too light compared to the O. It needs to be thicker, maybe longer horizontally as well.

2 minutes ago, the admiral said:

I'm not sure on the minor leagues. I thought that with the exception of a few weird minor-league parks like the old mini-Vet in S/W-B, it was cheaper just to grow grass. 

 

As for how St. Louis has dodged this when they had all those triple-digit temperatures at field level, no idea other than luck.

There were a lot of turf fields used in college, I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot of minor league stadiums using it as well. Even Aloha Stadium used turf, although that may have been so it was easier to transition from baseball to football. Atlanta lucked out because their cookie cutter was always grass. Same with RFK, I think, although it was only used for football when the Senators left.

But St. Louis was the first city I thought of with exceedingly-hot surfaces.

Surprising that Philadelphia seems to be the epicenter, at least for reported cases. If the cancer was somehow caused by prolonged inhaling of heated chemicals in the turf, why aren't there more cases from the midwest where it tends to be warmer? Two cases listed were from Kansas City, but none have been reported so far from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, or even Chicago (old Comiskey had a turf infield for many years in the 70s).

I'm sure there were plenty of minor league stadiums using that turf as well. And while football players wouldn't have the same length of time on the turf during the hottest part of the year, maybe there are unreported cases in some other outdoor turf fields in the south, like the Orange Bowl, Tulane Stadium, and Cotton Bowl.

Even on newer turf fields, unless they're using natural infills like sand and coconut shells, the heated crumb rubber can give off fumes, making it very hard to breathe, and sports where players spend a lot of time stationary can be very hazardous in the heat.

On 1/17/2023 at 12:09 PM, kmccarthy27 said:

Our McDonalds even served Pepsi, I think at that point only the 2nd one, the other being on Pepsi HQ property, did that. 

The first time I went to Las Vegas my friend & I stayed at Circus Circus, which served only Pepsi products. It had a McDonald's inside that also only had Pepsi drinks.

1 minute ago, infrared41 said:

 

They have to set all that bull- aside and do what's right and whatever works. If that means playing on the same day as the NCG then that's what happens. Play the game Wednesday and move both team's last game to next Monday if that's what it takes.

Maybe Tuesday? Didn't the league move a game to Tuesday during the covid year due to a team outbreak?

On 10/26/2022 at 4:56 PM, dont care said:

Numbers had to be 5 or lower so refs when calling fouls they only had to show the numbers on each hand, so 43 would be 4 fingers and 3 fingers ect

Not sure if or when that rule was ever enforced in the NBA. The Celtics had quite a few players in the 60s and 70s with numbers that would have violated that rule: Bill Russell (#6), John Havlicek (#17), Dave Cowens (#18), Don Nelson (#19). Even the Lakers' George Mikan wore #99 and he played until 1956.

Early college images would show players wearing double numbers 00, 11, 22, 33, etc through 99, but starting the late 50s they went to only using digits 0-5.

Thought Pantone stated legacy files (or older files created with Pantone spot colors) won't be affected - you just won't be able to add their colors to new files or palettes.

On 10/24/2022 at 11:03 PM, tBBP said:

 

Side note: do y'all see how big Scott Zolak's head is?? Dude was bordering on Larry Allen territory squeezing that melon up in that helmet. (I wonder if the Patriots Pro Shop is still selling his jersey...I came thisclose to getting his instead of Drew Bledsoe's last time I was up there.)

 

I am aware how big Scott Zolak's head is every time I turn on sports radio or have to listen to the Patriots in the car.

10 hours ago, WSU151 said:

The Patriots could really do so much more with the endzone mark; fill it in with blue or red, outlined in white...or vice-versa. The plain white letters are just so bland. For me, the cursive script was a far better fit for the brand. 

The field is still in use by the New England Revolution. I believe they use minimal decorations and markings until the Revs' season ends in October.