jackkmart

And just like that I have two more entirely new concepts to post that I made entirely for fun.

 

First El Paso.

 

 

 

Anyone with good knowledge of minor league baseball might immediately recognize that this team shares its colors with the El Paso Chihuahuas. I think these colors just work so well for a desert team, especially as brown is criminally underused in sports.

 

Next!

 

 

 

Two Texas hockey teams, just for fun. These were designed to be minor league teams, hence the perhaps a but silly mascot choices. I would explain more but I feel I want to keep the writing in these posts relatively brief so if you have any questions about design choices I'd be happy to answer!

 

 

After a minor hiatus I'm back to post some of the work I've been doing this past month. Mostly hockey stuff again. 

 

The first concept is actually  rebrand I was asked to do for yet another sim league. I present the Montreal Patriotes refresh.

 

 

The mascot/ logo here is based upon two major inspirations. Primarily, it's based on the Quebec Patriot Movement flag linked here (which is itself based on this art). It's supposed to be an 'old' revolutionary Quebecois patriot from the early 1800s smoking a pipe, wearing a cozy, if not a little oversized wool hat (I'm not certain on the history here but from my limited research this seems to check out). 

 

The second inspiration was another post here from long ago by Tyler Rodgers (which you can see). If anyone can link the actual forum post I would be grateful. As you can see I pretty much shamelessly ripped off his shield design and reworked it and placed my own OC logo within. However, the actual mark of the old patriot is entirely my work. 

 

A couple notes as well, the old logo is itself well made and pretty good but very different to my 'style' and maybe a tad too busy so my primary goal was to simplify the logo while still giving it a very unique look. I think I achieved this and I really like the final product (albeit there still could be some minor improvements and refinements here and there)

 

I'm still relatively new to logo making on Illustrator so I have yet to really get to grips with all the requisite tools so there are undoubtedly issues with my marks. 

 

Next concept: the Morgantown Druids. 

 

This one I'm not super confident on but I really wanted to try to create a team with some Celtic imagery that uses a somewhat unusual mascot. However, i spent so long on the primary mark I got a little burned out and ended up creating somewhat boring alternate logo designs. Maybe you guys have some better ideas?

 

Let me know what you think! 

 

 

 

This one is a little more abstract but the mascot is supposed to be some sort of Celtic inspired, mythical creature. For the design I took inspiration from old Irish art, the Green Knight, and 'spriggans' from Elder Scrolls (lol).  I think this works well for West Virginia as it's a state with a rich history of cryptids and legend while being heavily forested which obviously lends well to a team represented by a forest creature. This is also why I tried to include orange in this design as for some reason I think green and orange are very good colors for an Appalachian team.

 

Otherwise, the secondary logos feature a 'rune' which is meant to be a W, V, and M all interwoven to represent Morgantown, West Virginia.  I like how it looks but it may be a little too hard to comprehend upon a quick glance. 

 

I initially had no other colors beyond shades of green and the light beige but figured an accent color would be much more interesting so I tried blue and orange and I think orange came out much better. 

 

I hope you guys like it, and generally let me know what you think could be improved!

15 hours ago, BlueMoon18 said:

Love what you did with Chicago dude. The state of Illinois in the butcher's knife in the secondary is extremely clever. 

Gulf Coast is cool too! I didn't expect the reference to Top Gun, but it worked out perfectly! Keep this series going!

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you like the designs.

After posting the first concept I immediately remembered I had another one all ready to go as well. This one I did upon request for the ISFL which is an online 'Sim Football League' I used to be in. It's a little nerdy but it's pretty fun even though I'm not active over there anymore. Regardless, one of my old GMs reached out and asked me to do some concepts for his current team the Chicago Butchers and here's what we came up with.

 

They wanted to be represented by a boar or hog type creature and include some motifs from their current branding which includes a lot of cleavers and blood and whatnot. 

 

This one is obviously a football concept and, again uniforms may come later but as of right now all that we've completed is the general branding although I do include some helmet designs at the end of this post.

 

 

 

This one was pretty fun and I think I did an alright job of updating their look without straying too far from what they currently sport.  There's also some fun little design quirks in this one. The snout on the boar/ hog creature is meant to resemble football stitching, the boar's nose (and the overall style of the primary) utilizes a design very similar to the Chicago Bulls as a tie in or nod to their city's basketball team, while still being distinct enough. The iconic Chicago star is also interspersed throughout. The secondary is meant to be a direct update of their current logo which is a hand holding a bloody cleaver, but here I went a little more angular and chose to replace the hand with a somewhat abstract glove or mitten as a nod to the brutal Chicago weather and I think it makes the bloody cleaver a little less imposing (IDK I just didn't want the branding to come across too murderous or edgy, that might turn some people off). 

 

Overall the brand is supposed to look quite angular and 'knife-like', lot's of sharp edges and stuff to evoke that butcher feel.

 

Overall I think the look came out pretty well and look forward to developing the designs a little more with the team if they choose to use it and then maybe then I can start workshopping some uniforms. 

 

Obviously feedback and critique is always welcome!

 

Also, as a final note, the colors may look a little inconsistent that's just because of the exporting I did, I think I changed my settings in between some of the exports by accident, I might update to fix that in a bit if it's too noticable. 

 

 

 

Introduction and First Concept

 

Recently I've gotten back into design, especially sports design, and I've been really trying to come up with some unusual or interesting team names, concepts, brands, etc. This is something I started to do and explore with NACA concepts (my mostly defunct?  project. IDK I may continue or revamp it someday) but felt kind of limited by the University angle I put on myself. So, upon returning I decided not to tie myself to any constraints except to do something a little out of left field for each concept and brand. 

 

With all that being said, this thread may eventually turn into one where I dump a bunch of kind of 'wacky' sports concepts or it may just be a couple.

 

EDIT: This thread has ended up being a lot longer and more complex than I had originally planned so I'm gonna hijack my first concept and create a contents page on this reply.

 

Contents

 

Hockey Concepts

 

Gulf Coast Mavericks

Morgantown Druids

Montreal Patriotes

El Paso Desiertos & Houston Spacehawks

New Orleans Specters

Cleveland Cavalry

Mississippi Marsh Monsters

Tahoe Lake Tigers

New York Ferrymen

Charleston Colliers

Halifax Expedition

Nunavut Nanook

Great Falls Grizzlies

 

American Football Concepts

 

Chicago Butchers

 

Baseball Concepts

Idaho Komets

 

 

 

Without further adieu I present the first concept; the Gulf Coast Mavericks.

 

 

 

 

Explanation

 

It's a lot I know, but the general idea is a team that subverts the name maverick, usually represented by a horse/ mustang, and instead refers to the Maverick of Top Gun fame and then riffing off that idea. Obviously, the character isn't supposed to directly reference Tom Cruise as Maverick but instead a sort of amalgam of 80s action heros and 'cool guys'. 

 

My initial idea was to place the team in the Florida panhandle near Tallahassee or Pensacola as there is a relatively large airbase near there that I forget the name of and this acts as another tie in to the Top Gun sort of aesthetic. I think this also fits in nicely with the color scheme which could also be interpreted as a sunrise or set which works very well for a Florida based team.  

 

I'm currently working on jersey sets to go with this brand, and while I feel I'm mostly finished I think I'm gonna work on them a bit more before posting them. Also I might chop and change the way in which this stuff is presented because I know one long scroll of images isn't particularly interesting.

 

In the meantime I'd love to hear any criticisms and/or general feedback you guys have for these designs and the brand as a whole. I know gradients can be a little overpowering but I think it works for the whole faux 80s/ 'over-the-top' aesthetic!

 

Ultimately these concepts are meant to be fun and light and explore some more relatively unexplored ideas in the sports world.

 

 

 

 

 

Greywood College

Wardens

 

 I'm still workshopping jersey designs for the Wardens as of right now but I wanted to post the first showcase first anyway while i finish the jerseys.

 

I really enjoyed this one and I even created a bit more of a backstory for Greywood than usual. The David Henry Greywood College of South Dakota (More commonly known as Greywood College or GCSD) was founded primarily for the study of Geology and Ecology in the American west. For this reason David Greywood established the school in the 'wild west' on the border of what would become the Black Hills national forest. 

 

Due to the schools proximity to so many national parks and forests the school originally took up the unofficial moniker of 'Rangers' in reference to the park rangers in the national service but the name Wardens was officially adopted by the school when the National Forests Service partnered with the school. 

 

The school colors are various shades of grey in reference to the name of the school's founder.

Central Louisiana University

Bourbons

I sorta left this topic/ project behind last spring but I really want to finish or at least expand on the ideas and add more teams at least for a while. The CLU Bourbons were already in the works back in April but I didn't bother to 'complete' them until last night. I don't consider this team finished either but I wanted to throw what I currently have out there so I can move onto other teams and circle back to redesign.

 

The third jersey diverts quite a bit and is based on the Louisiana flag/ seal.

 

Wyoming State University

Founders

 

WRONG LOCATION ON HEADER! WILL FIX SOON

1 hour ago, Friedrich Stuart Macbeth said:

Are they all real, or do you make these up? Just curious.

they're all made up. 

Goodwell Christian University

Addax

 

I'm not too sure how I feel about the Addax (which is a type of antelope, I think) I like the colors and the logo is ok but I'm already thinking about ways to improve it as I dont think it looks as good as it could. 

 

Here I used some of the Phoenix Sun's color palette instead of coming up with my own like I had for the first two teams. C&C for the Addax is very welcome!

University of Florida at Three Lakes 

Gillmen

Team 2 baby! I wanted to make a green/ swamp themed team so I made the Gillmen whose branding is based off of the 'gillman' from the 1954 feature film 'Creature from the Black Lagoon'

 

The Gillman as a mascot is supposed to resemble a swamp monster/ man hybrid. 

Eagle County College

Avalanche Dogs

 

First team! I based the 'AvDogs' on a hat I have from Vail, CO which depicts a dog similar to the one I made for the primary logo. The secondary is derived from other merch I have from Vail, I think it might even be the official 'avalanche unit' logo.

 

North American Collegiate Athletics (NACA) Hockey Concepts

 

In this thread I will be adding my concepts for (made up) colleges and their hockey teams. This is going to be a long project I imagine and so far I only have a couple teams complete but I plan on making somewhere between  20-50 (maybe more?) teams across North America (not just the US) which will populate multiple 'conferences' or divisions. I also plan on making peripheral graphics for league logos, etc.

 

SOME SCHOOLS MAY SHARE NAMES WITH REAL LIFE SCHOOLS BUT THEY ARE NOT MEANT TO BE ASSOCIATED IN ANY WAY. THESE ARE ALL FICTIONAL CONCEPTS.

 

My main goal for all these teams is to create a unique brand based around non-traditional mascots/ team names and color schemes!

 

 

Central American Conference

Eagle County College V2

Goodwell Christian V2

Wyoming State V2

Greywood College

Deseret

Montana Valley (Coming Soon)

Alberta Agricultural (Coming Soon)

 

Sun Conference

Florida at Three Lakes V2

Central Louisiana V2

Carolina Atlantic

 

Great Pacific Conference

American Aerospace

Seattle

 

Eastern American Hockey Conference

Massachusetts Technological

Boston Institute

UMass North (Coming Soon)

Portland (MN) (Coming Soon)

Hartford College (Coming Soon)

Forrest College (Coming Soon)

Lancaster (Coming Soon)

Catskills (Coming Soon)

 

Hockeyland Conference

Midwestern (Coming Soon)

Milwaukee (Coming Soon)

North Star (Coming Soon)

Lakes (Coming Soon)

St. Clair (Coming Soon)

Quad Cities (Coming Soon)

Pine State (Coming Soon)

 

MORE TO COME! (HOPEFULLY)

I'm also playing with the idea of creating uniforms for more than just hockey for each school, but let me not get ahead of myself.