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Jelle's Marble Runs uniforms (28/28 hockey +1 bonus ; 2/28 baseball) - Team Primary added


WLD42

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Happy weekend! The next team to get jerseys are the Bumblebees, who, like the Minty Maniacs, made the jump from Hubelino Tournament to Marble League in 2020. They maintained a solid middle-of-the-pack status in their debut season and made a bit more of a splash in the Marbula 1 series, and they've steadily gained more and more supporters along the way. (Myself included!)

 

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The 'Bees get the Marble League's second chest stripe jersey, though only on the home, inspired, naturally, by the Canadiens. The stripe lines up with the logo, with yellow on the inside, then brown, and dark brown on the outside. The hem stripe is different, again as the Habs do (if it works for them, I'm not going to reinvent that wheel); the dark-brown/yellow/brown order matches the numbers and NOB. The white jersey eliminates the chest stripe, but retains the striping pattern, and uses the stripe as a "full-size" hem stripe. The yellow shoulder yoke gets a double border to also match the striping. (The logo has two shades of yellow, but trying to use both felt messy and unnecessary, so other than the logo itself and the little secondary logo on the pants, the brighter yellow doesn't make an appearance.)

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I think the whole thing would be improved for the Bumblebees if the lighter yellow was used. Keep the paler yellow on the logo only, not the other way around. It feels too dark right now. The double brown is cool, but it needs a brighter yellow to off set it a little bit more.

"And those who know Your Name put their trust in You, for You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You." Psalms 9:10

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17 hours ago, chcarlson23 said:

I think the whole thing would be improved for the Bumblebees if the lighter yellow was used. Keep the paler yellow on the logo only, not the other way around. It feels too dark right now. The double brown is cool, but it needs a brighter yellow to off set it a little bit more.

 

Thanks for the feedback! My thought process had been informed somewhat by the other three yellow teams in the league (Mellow Yellow, Team Primary, and Crazy Cat's Eyes), all older than the Bumblebees and all using a similar shade of brighter yellow, so the "honey yellow" was a way for the Bumblebees to stand out. But from a pure design perspective, I tried your suggestion, and in my opinion it's a lateral move at worst and an improvement at best, so good call!

 

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While I was at it, I also took a stab at a more substantial redesign that does include both shades of yellow, since I did like the way the honey yellow of the chest stripe matches the logo's design.

 

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Not sure I like it as much as either of the single-yellow versions, but here it is regardless; you never know if you don't try!

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The Limers are an Original 16 team, whose performance has been, to put it bluntly, somewhat unremarkable over the years, and yet they somehow still manage to often find themselves in the limelight. (I couldn't help it.) They have a pretty big fanbase, with the most hooligan-y reputation of any team's fans, and a strong rivalry with the Raspberry Racers. So even when the team doesn't find itself in the thick of things standings-wise, there's always a good chance of some drama in the stands.

 

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The logo and color palette proved tricky to work with, with three different shades of green and no other colors to serve as secondary colors. I ultimately had to rely on the dark green as a "secondary" color, as it provided the most contrast to the others. The jersey design just came about from playing around with different elements and trying different things in a sort of trial-and-error way, since I didn't have any strong gut feelings on where to start. It ended up with a sort of Columbus Blue Jackets vibe, with little half-stripes at the cuffs where CBJ have their star. The waist and sock stripes are "inspired by" the cuff stripes, but with a nontraditional flair of their own. All in all, it's a very unconventional design, but I think it's cohesive when it's all said and done!

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The Indigo Stars joined the league in 2019 and have been wholly unremarkable in the two years they've been competing, qualifying in '19 but finishing near the bottom, and missing out on qualification in '20. They've yet to earn many fans based on those performances, but if and when they ever turn it around, those six die-hard Indigo Stars fans will be able to say they've stuck with them from the start!

 

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I went with a more traditional striping pattern based on the clean, minimalist shapes of the logo. The stripes on the indigo jersey and the white jersey are slightly more different than just a simple rearrangement of the colors, though; dropping from three thin stripes down to two, and making minor adjustments to the weights of the stripes, felt like the best balance of colors on the white jersey. It also let the stripes match the double-outlined yoke (because nobody wants to see a shoulder yoke with a triple outline), and including the indigo yoke was important to me for a team using the color in their name. I spent way too much time turning the wordmark into a number font, but I'm happy with the results.

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19 hours ago, Bomba Tomba said:

I like the number font. What font is it?

I honestly just cobbled together those three number (1, 4, and 5) from the team's wordmark, using pieces of the I, T, and R, and improvising for the angled bits of the 1 and 4. So as far as I know, it's not a full font with a name or anything like that, unless the original designer got it from somewhere rather than creating it himself. (In my head, though, I can't help but think of Jurassic Park every time I look at it!)

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Following up the Indigo Stars with the other perennially "forgotten" team, the Shining Swarm. They joined in the Marble League's second year, 2017, but after putting in a decent debut performance, they've been almost invisible since. The Swarm have yet to make a second appearance, but in 2020 they finally qualified for the 2021 qualifiers by avoiding the Showdown's bottom four.

 

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I don't usually care for gradients on hockey jerseys, but if there's any one team whose logo, name, and general aesthetic calls for it, it's the Shining Swarm. Once I got the gradients right on each jersey, the cuff and hem treatments were pretty simple, but felt important to keep the jerseys from being too plain. I did swap the order of the thin stripe vs. the thick stripe between the dark jersey and the light jersey, as it just looked better based on the colors in each situation. The helmet for the dark jersey isn't particularly dark, but I figured it's far enough from white that they could get away with it. The striping pattern on the socks may be a little unusual, but I wanted to do solid stripes rather than use the gradient again, so I copied the order of the colors from the logo.

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Three teams to go, and today's is the Jungle Jumpers, the group of daredevil marbles with a penchant for oversleeping. They joined in the Marble League's second season of 2017, and have been a mid-tier competitor with a decent fan following, thanks not only to the marbles' appearance and occasional good performances, but also their out-of-competition "lore" in the JMR universe. The team's history prior to the Marble League was in BASE jumping and other extreme sports, and they're perhaps most notorious for missing the final event of the 2017 Marble League after medaling in the previous two events, which was explained in-universe as a result of oversleeping after celebrating those two medals.

 

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I chose not to use the team's "extreme" reputation as inspiration for the jerseys, going for something a little more traditional and restrained, but I did use the BASE jumping motif as a "jumping off point" in deciding to go with the V-style striping, pointing downwards as though falling. After settling on the V, it was just a matter of determining a good-looking order for the colors and weights of the stripes, which didn't really have a deep thought process behind it other than trying a few different things and comparing them. The shoulder yoke on the white jersey was a fun way to keep some color and continue the theme of the striping in an unconventional way, and the added block of dark green on the cuffs felt necessary to balance things and keep the lighter green from dominating too much.

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The penultimate set of jerseys is for the Hornets, who were the second fan-made along with the Turtle Sliders to join in 2019. Neither has been very successful, but the Hornets have been marginally more successful by at least qualifying for the 2020 Marble League and participating in the first season of Marbula 1, although finishing last in both. Naturally, they have a strong rivalry with the Bumblebees, though it's been a fairly one-sided rivalry so far, and the Hornets have attracted fewer fans, even with the 'Bees making the jump to the Marble League a year after the Hornets.

 

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Much like the Turtle Sliders' jerseys, the Hornets' got a bit of a "2000s expansion team" treatment, with a very modern, nontraditional look to them. The logo has some curves, but is still very sharp and angular, so the jersey follows that same style, going for an abstract "stinger" effect. Not a whole lot else to give commentary on besides that, since that's pretty much the only element of the jersey design!

 

I'll post the final team fairly soon just to wrap all the hockey jerseys up, and eventually revive the thread for baseball uniforms once I have a few in hand; I still want to do them because I do enjoy learning more about baseball aesthetics, but it's a slower process since both the "rules" of baseball design and the template itself are newer to me. But I know the JMR subreddit will like them, so I may as well post them here too, though I may share a few at a time rather than just one per post.

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The last Marble League team to get the hockey jersey treatment is one of the Original 16, Team Primary. An early fan favorite for their bright colors and fun team members' names (Prim, Rima, Imar, and Mary), the team has been frustratingly inconsistent, qualifying for only two Marble League tournaments so far, but always has an interesting storyline going on. They are well-known for temporarily merging with Team Momo in the 2018 Marble League after Momo was decimated by injuries, forming Team Momary for the remainder of that tournament, and for their hot-and-cold performance in the first season of Marbula 1, in which Prim carried the team and was a legitimate contender for the individual championship while Mary failed to earn a single point in the entire season. The Marbula 1 performance has led to Team Primary and Mary in particular being one of the most memed aspects of JMR, with "cube" being a label Mary will have a hard time shaking, and between that and the failure to qualify for the 2020 Marble League, Mary stepped down from the team captaincy, passing it to Imar.

 

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The Team Primary jerseys have a heavy dose of Winnipeg Jets inspiration, making use of both their name and number font, and the stripes+sleeve look on the white jersey. The three relatively big stripes seemed like the best way to make the three primary colors the focus of the design when there can only be a single base color to a jersey, and I went for the unique look of not only colored sleeves, but also colored side panels on the white jersey, because it just felt like it didn't have enough of the deeper yellow otherwise; it also connects the jersey design and the pants stripe. Because of how much real estate the sleeve stripes take up, Team Primary is also the only team in the league to put their sleeve numbers on the shoulder, giving the sleeves and their design room to breathe.

 

But wait, there's more! I didn't intend to do any non-active Jelle's Marble Runs teams when I started this, mostly because of the lack of logos, but during the recent Winter Marble League mini-tournament, the retired Gliding Glaciers got a short write-up featurette that included a sharp-looking logo in the style of the 28 current teams. The Glaciers' career was short, as their only appearance was in the qualifiers for the 2018 Marble League, the only full-length Winter tournament to date. But they've managed to hold a special place in fans' memories, perhaps due to being the only other winter-themed team aside from the Snowballs, and in the recent article they were shown to have kept busy as the designers of the indoor artificial bobsled track that was just used in the mini Winter Marble League. So here's a bonus hockey jersey concept for the Gliding Glaciers!

 

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I wasn't feeling the dark blue as a base color for the home jersey, so I did end up sampling one of the light blues from the logo's gradient; even so, it ended up being demoted to an accent color in the white jersey, but I just really liked the look of it and none of my attempts to use it more heavily looked any good to me. It's tough to make out without expanding the image, but the logo does have a solid pink drop-shadow with the "GG," so I didn't have to sample part of the gradient to get a pink, and obviously that's where I got the look of the numbers from, too. The shape of the logo is so unconventional compared to the other teams' (and it is an unofficial fan-made logo not by the designer of the 28 official ones, so that may have something to do with it), that I had to make use of it somehow in the jersey design, leading to the chest stripe/sash hybrid that ties into the crest. And because there's not enough going on already, I went with the short-lived Hurricanes extra-large shoulder yoke, with Rangers-style stripes mirroring the chest stripe. It ended up being a somewhat busy jersey, but I don't think it's too much, and as a team that never really got to be more than a "minor-league" team, perhaps there is a degree of "try-hard" to their identity!

 

Thanks for entertaining my pet project and for the occasional comments, and a shout-out to @Section30 for quietly "liking" throughout the series! Like I said earlier, I'll return to baseball concepts down the road, once this thread has disappeared into the depths, but I'm also looking forward to turning my attention to some "real team" hockey concepts for a while.

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