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Washington Capitals Rebranding


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i think i've found a way to satisfy both parties to the arguement ...

at the top of the capitol building in washington D.C. sits a statue called the Statue of Freedom.

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both an eagle and stars ...

Looks more like someone killed a chicken, then put the corpse on their head.

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Listen, move the team to winnipeg, argument over.

*let me preface this by acknowledging that youre prolly using sarcasm, but youre a Pens fan, so :censored: it* bankruptcy say what?

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For a team named the "Capitals" to rely on generic nationalist iconography like eagle heads and big stars and whatnot is quite poor. (As is relying on the shape of a hockey stick.) I do think the previous Caps eagle logo was sufficiently localized by the choice of the very official-DC-evoking colors, but only just. In any case, I think the Capitol Dome needs to be the conceptual starting point of any Caps team identity, whether it remains an overt part of the finished logo set or not.

And the Capitol Dome doesn't qualify as generic nationalist iconography? I don't know about that, but I do respect your critiques even if I don't agree with them sometimes. They way I see that argument is this: a capitol is a building housing a state or national legislative body; it's a piece of architecture. Fine if they were the Washington Capitols, but they're not. The problem is that the name 'Capitals' totally sucks. Capital is really only used in its plural form when talking about uppercase letters (This needs to be in all capitals), and when talking about more than one capital city (Please name the capitals of North and South Dakota). Beyond that, capital is used as a singular noun (Washington, D.C. is the capital city of the United States or He has enough initial capital to start a Quizno's franchise), or as a collective noun referring to those who possess wealth and use it to control a society's economic activity (There was a conflict of interest between capital and labor, resulting in a strike). Basically, the word 'capitals' has no practical use as the name of a sports team, which is probably why they have always had such a generic identity, beginning with the hockey stick logotype, going through to the starry eagle logo, and now with the eagle W. It's difficult to design for such a bad and generic name.

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Fantastic rebranding here... love it all the way around.

My lone suggestion would be to darken the red. IMO, the red is rather bright (although in fairness, it could just be my screen setting) and especially on the home jersey, is pretty blinding and difficult to look at, especially next to the deep blue in the pants.

But outside of that, great great work. The eagle logo is beautiful, as is the Capitol logo.

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that anyone living anywhere else has got to be, in some sense, kidding."

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For a team named the "Capitals" to rely on generic nationalist iconography like eagle heads and big stars and whatnot is quite poor. (As is relying on the shape of a hockey stick.) I do think the previous Caps eagle logo was sufficiently localized by the choice of the very official-DC-evoking colors, but only just. In any case, I think the Capitol Dome needs to be the conceptual starting point of any Caps team identity, whether it remains an overt part of the finished logo set or not.

And the Capitol Dome doesn't qualify as generic nationalist iconography? I don't know about that, but I do respect your critiques even if I don't agree with them sometimes. They way I see that argument is this: a capitol is a building housing a state or national legislative body; it's a piece of architecture. Fine if they were the Washington Capitols, but they're not. The problem is that the name 'Capitals' totally sucks. Capital is really only used in its plural form when talking about uppercase letters (This needs to be in all capitals), and when talking about more than one capital city (Please name the capitals of North and South Dakota). Beyond that, capital is used as a singular noun (Washington, D.C. is the capital city of the United States or He has enough initial capital to start a Quizno's franchise), or as a collective noun referring to those who possess wealth and use it to control a society's economic activity (There was a conflict of interest between capital and labor, resulting in a strike). Basically, the word 'capitals' has no practical use as the name of a sports team, which is probably why they have always had such a generic identity, beginning with the hockey stick logotype, going through to the starry eagle logo, and now with the eagle W. It's difficult to design for such a bad and generic name.

First off, and without looking anything up, Bismark and Pierre.

Questioning the use of the plural is fine, but you do realize that if you take that logic at all seriously, about half of all sports team names in North America won't meet your standards? The plural refers to the players, not to the thing that provides the source of the name; that's how the usage developed from the singular team names of the 1850s to the plural team names of today. (The players of the 1859 National Base Ball Club of Washington are called "Nationals" in the press; eventually the public adopts the term to describe the team as a corporate entity, and soon thereafter teams adopt plural names universally. For example.)

I wouldn't agree that the Capitals have a bad name, or even a generic name. But I'm with you they do have a name that does not lend itself to any obvious, local iconography. Which is why I would start with the Capitol. An eagle or a star are national in character; they stand for America as a nation. Though the Capitol building is in fact the home of a national institution and owned by the people of the United States in common, it is almost never used as a symbol of the nation as a whole. If used at all, it's used as a symbol of the federal government, as distinct from the concept of the nation itself. And it is the presence of the federal government to which the name "Capitals" refers. This is sometimes referred to as the "federal character" of the city. It's a tough thing to illustrate, but it's not impossible. And in fact the thing I really liked about the old Caps uniforms was the color scheme. The blue, black, and bronze captured quite well the look and feel of the federal presence in downtown Washington, much more locally and specifically than the generically national red, white, and blue of the American flag. Official Washington is not red, white, and blue; it's blue and gold (with brown and black highlights).

Anyway, that's why I think the team identity needs to start with the Capitol Dome, even if the dome itself doesn't make it into the logo in any overt way. Besides being a homonym, it's a nationally recognizable symbol of the concept that the team name stands for.

I think I forgot to mention earlier that I think this concept is superior in most ways to what the Caps are actually wearing now. If I ran the Caps, I wouldn't choose this concept as my team identity, but I would choose it if I had to select between this concept and the current uniforms. But I would promote the tertiary logo to primary status.

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