Orlando Ospreys

[rentz]

Hello. I've been working on an identity to use for my fantasy football team this year. The nickname I'm using is Ospreys. If you don't know what they are, I'm pretty sure it is the animal the Seattle Seahawks are based on. It is a fairly large bird of prey hunts almost exclusively for fish. Here's the logo:

The colors are brown and gold, which I think is a great combination but you never see it anywhere (you barely ever see brown at all). The wordmark I'm not sure about, I may replace it with something a bit more distinctive as I'm afraid it is really generic right now.

As for the uniforms, I'm a bit stuck at the moment because I'm not sure whether to use white or gold helmets/pants. White is a bit more reminiscent of the colors of the bird, and I like the mono white look, but gold uses the colors better... so I'll take C+C on which way to go.

or

The thing that is probably most striking is the helmet. I love Eagles/Rams/Vikings type helmets, and I have always thought that the distinctive stripe across the eye of an osprey would look great as a football helmet. I think it looks good but I'll see what you guys think. The stripe idea is carried onto the jersey as the shoulder stripes. I didn't want to be too outlandish with the jerseys so I have a standard block font and a pretty normal pants stripe.

And for kicks... throwbacks!

All C+C is welcome.

EDIT: For some reason photobucket is shrinking them a bit so they seem a bit blurry... to see them without the blurriness, drag the image into your address bar.

[skier14]

I love the logo and jerseys. The colors are great. I'm not such a fan of the helmets, but it is really starting to grow on me. Maybe change the facemsk on the away alternate to red as well. also the pants stripe seems sort of out of place in this design. But its a great concept

[DelayedPenalty]

Those helmets are wicked fierce!

I love that the logo is detailed, without being overly cluttered or overdone.

I like the gold pants with the white jersey better than the white on white, but that's just a personal preference.

[GFB]

No offense, but it looks like your Osprey has the bird flu, rabies, mad cow or something... I get creeped out just by looking at it.

[Mings]

I don't like how angular the wordmark is versus the sharp curvilinear nature of the logo itself. Besides that I love the colors and the right amount of detail in the logo.

[cjzilligen]

I think the logo would be perfect if it didn't terminate that awkwardly. I think if you stretch the top half of the edge out and eliminate the amount of spokes on the edge, you'd have an A+ logo.

Great work

[elsephen]

Those helmets are really nice.

[Squeezee12]

I like it. Good work. Really like those helmets.

[Lights Out]

The helmet is absolutely brilliant in either color - I love the idea. But the jersey seems way too much like a wannabe-Rams/Jets uniform. Maybe you could do a wing pattern on each shoulder.

[illwauk]

I've touted the brown & gold combo for a minute now... always love seeing it used.

I say keep the gold helmets for the homes and white on the road. Gold pants look better with both sets though.

As far as the throwbacks... the jerseys look more like something a team with a short history would wear to try to cash in on a throwback trend rather than something that actually would've been worn back in the day. Change the striping pattern to something more LSU/Colts-style. And maybe use athletic (yellow) gold if for no other reason than mis-matched golds were quite common up until about 20 years ago (see: Florida State in the 80s)

[DeadFish]

I like the helmets - very 'Battle of the Planets' - I think they would be quite a sight staring back at you from the line of scrimmage.

[rentz]

Thanks for the comments.

Nothing too drastic for the logo, just tried to smooth it out so it flows better. I added ORLANDO to the wordmark. I still am not that happy with the wordmark but it looks pretty good and I'll stick with it until I can find something that fits better.

I'm glad people seem to like the helmets-- I wasn't sure how people would feel about them. I decided to go with gold helmets/pants. I think white/brown/white is the best look, but I think that using the gold balances the set out a bit more. I considered doing white/brown/white for home and white/white/gold for away, but then there really isn't consistency between the two. I also updated the shoulder stripe a bit, and added TV numbers.

C+C welcome.

[The Fixer]

I'm going to keep it simple.

Logo- that looks really bad***. Would be awesome on the helmet. Maybe an oval beind it?

Wordmark- simply amazing. Really cool

Helmets- ugliest helmets I've ever seen but that's just me. I frankly don't like them. I like the white though with my earlier suggestion. Both would be really cool to see o. Davidson's template, but I know you used inkscape. I could try though if you want

jerseys- maybe one of the coolest sleeves I've ever seen

throwback- none of it's really clicking for me

edit:

forgot a few things.

Pants- I'd love to see something match the jersey sleeve

team name- awesome, I always thought that it was a sweet bird but seahawks is such a better name. But it sounds great here

colors- really hard to make something with this color scheme. But it looks ok here

[sergeimakarenkov44]

helmet=awesome

[rentz]

Here, Fixer, I have GIMP which works with Davidson's helmet templates, not as well as photoshop but it is serviceable. So here's a very rough mockup on a photorealistic template.

As far as the pants stripe goes, I know it should preferably resemble the shoulder stripe but I'm having trouble doing it in a way that doesn't look ostentatious.

The throwback kind of developed off an idea that I had to do an O with an inline, so it kind of looks like two O's, one inside of another. The wordmark developed from that, and then I kind of threw the jerseys together, so there was a significantly less amount of work in them than the regular set haha. But I'll try to make it better and more authentic I guess.

[cjzilligen]

I dunno, the logo still looks a bit off to me. The back of the osprey looks reall awkward and abrubt, I think that's your only problem here. I think with the first two or three spokes from under the chin you had it right, then after that the flow of the strokes went in a completely different direction. If you did this to make the logo look more rough and jagged, I'd just drop it because you've aced that technique in the inside strokes.

You can take it for what it's worth.

EDIT: 800th post

[rentz]

Well, honestly I guess that is kind of the look I'm going for. The feathers on an osprey's head head have a tendency to stick up a bit, especially towards the back, which is quite different than, say, an eagle or hawk, in which the feathers lie down pretty flat on the head. But I appreciate the comment. Here's an example, not the picture I used for reference but it shows what I'm talking about pretty well.

[cjzilligen]

Yea I see what you mean ow. You could still make it have the same effect though, by possibly making those 3 top strokes a bit larger and more like the other four.

[johnnygriswold]

I think you're almost there with the bird head logo. All the zig zag highlight/shading lines add tension to the logo. Try smoothing things out more with more consistent flow.

The helmets are awesome!

[AHcreative]

The logo's sweet, but I'm really not feeling that wordmark. I think it's too angular for the logo, the bird's head flows more than it being angular and jagged. As far as the helmets go, I think they're awesome, very original and out-of-the-box without being too crazy. Great job.