American Soccer Concepts - Colorado Rapids (Update) & Vancouver Whitecaps

[VictoriaGooner]

I too am sorry for this thread getting some serious responses...this is a very well designed league. Keep it up mate!

[crashcarson15]

Damn, it's been a month already? I wanted to keep the kit mainly blue on the OC concept (so no stripes) but also needed a design element on the crest so, meh, I'm not overly concerned.

Boston City FC

Today is Saint Patrick's Day! I am on a college campus. One whose nickname is the "Fighting Irish." If there's one thing I've learned today, it's that you can't forget that today is Saint Patrick's Day, so I made a concept.

At some point in time before the Revolution come to their senses and move the club to an SSS closer to Boston, I could very easily see the NASL or the USL trying to capitalize on the city's technical lack of a club and that's what I have Boston City FC doing here in the USL. City uses strong Irish imagery (of course, Boston has a strong connection to Irish culture... see the Celtics, so it fits) and I went with City as a counter to the English side Boston United. Wonder if BCFC'll have a segment on Sky called "Boston Goals."

I decided to simply use the shamrock as the center of pretty much everything here. The crest is just a shamrock—actually the one from the Notre Dame shamrock logo—surrounded by the "Boston City Football Club" crest in a font that's reminiscent of a Gaelic one. The kits evoke the flag of Ireland—the home kit white, the road kit black—while Zipcar is the sponsor on this one (they're a company based in the Boston metro) because it seemed like it fit the kits alright. Really though, everything here should be fairly self-explanatory so I won't say more.

Victoria AFC

For those of you that have been following my work over the last few years, you'll remember a series I did titled the "Tim Horton's National Soccer Association" in which I created a 16-team Canadian league. I wanted to have the opportunity to work on a few of those concepts and to keep things realistic, so I'm bringing Canadian teams back in the fold for this concept series moving forward.

This is one of those concepts for which I started with a kit design and evolved the rest of the identity from there. I've been watching some Aussie rules football as the season gets underway and I really, really like Melbourne FC's kits and I wanted to do a concept that was a little reminiscent of them here on the soccer pitch. Conveniently enough, the shape makes a "V" and the proposed team plays in Victoria so that made things easy.

As for the crest, I started with a generic shield shape and put the "V" from the kits in on the upper half. From there, I wanted to display "Victoria" in the trendy way the "Vancouver" text is displayed in the Canucks' Heritage Classic jerseys outside of the "V" and placed that. The club ended up Victoria AFC simply because "AFC" looked better in the crest than "FC" did and the sun at the top of the crest is reminiscent of the sun in the provincial flag of British Columbia. Rogers is the sponsor here because I felt it fit well!

These two concepts admittedly have nothing to do with each other so there is that. Let me know how I did! Got a lot more I'm interested in dropping the next few days.

[crashcarson15]

Gonna bump this back to the top?

[1clkgtramg]

Both are good, but I'm always bitching about sponsors haha. Rogers is from/headquartered in Toronto. Telus is headquartered in Burnaby which would be a little bit better fit for a BC team. That being said, I realize the sponsor is only from that given city about 50% of the time. But it's your concepts, they could be sponsored by Todd's Pizza lol.

There is something about the Canucks-esque triangle, maybe its the template or its just too low, it looks kinda strange. Boston is completely fine the way it is.

[VictoriaGooner]

Both Boston and Victoria are good concepts. Liked the idea of incorporating the Irish flag and Irish symbology into the Boston kit. I like the idea of the Victoria AFC kits. I would suggest using a royal blue instead of that grey blue to represent the City of Victoria flag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Victoria,_British_Columbia

And the logo is simple and that's perfect for a small city like Victoria. As for the shirt sponsor, I would suggest using White Spot because it's a BC created business with tons of history and would fit well with the Victoria theme. Great concepts Carson. Keep up the fantastic work and looking forward to the rest of this thread.

[crashcarson15]

I really went with the sponsorship because it looked good. Might go back and see what's up with some of the other suggestions though if I get a chance. Onto two actually related concepts now...

Cincinnati FC

It doesn't make sense that Cincinnati wouldn't have second-tier soccer in this setup so I've brought in a traditional look here. The top of the crest features a buckeye leaf—the state tree and taken from the city flag—and the rest of the crest is based off of that. Kept things simple and introduced a new Warrior template here. Smucker's fit the traditional feel of this concept to me and I don't think there's too much else to explain.

Dayton Dutch Lions

To complete the derby (albeit in different leagues), I wanted to get my Dayton Dutch Lions concept out here. The Dutch Lions are currently a USL-Pro club and they stick around here but there are certainly some things that bug me about their identity and specifically their current crest. For an orange-based team, I didn't feel like a blue-heavy crest really worked, so I switched up the colors on the crest to reflect that. I also didn't like the text font, so I used something more cutting-edge with Conrad's font based off the Atlanta Hawks.

As for the kits, I took a nod from the crest and used a diagonally-split shirt similar to that used by AS Monaco or FC Utrecht in the Netherlands. I wanted to make the home split between white and orange—like the crest—while the blue and black looked good to me on the road kit. It admittedly looks a little awkward—I couldn't get it to look right running from the shoulder to the hip in the traditional manner (it just didn't look right with the crest), so I had to go with what you see below. Huntington Bank is the sponsor—they're based in southwestern Ohio if I recall correctly—and past that, I'm not sure what else there is to say here.

Let me know, guys!

[VictoriaGooner]

Both enjoy Cincinnati's and Dayton's concepts Carson. Very nice simple looks. I don't mind the sash not starting exactly at the shoulder and ending at the hip. It's a nice change from the normal template mold. Keep up the great work.

I was wondering if you are planning on posting a listing of all the clubs that will be based in this new American Soccer pyramid through the three leagues..

[TrueYankee26]

Hmm.. Boston City script don't look to gaelic to me

This is what I think of when I see "gaelic"

I know it's a wee nitpick, other than that, nice concepts man, I especially adore Cincinnati's.

[VictoriaGooner]

Hmm.. Boston City script don't look to gaelic to me

This is what I think of when I see "gaelic"

I know it's a wee nitpick, other than that, nice concepts man, I especially adore Cincinnati's.

You could use Aon Carsi Celtic font off of dafont.com, its the best Celtic font I could find. I used it for my Victoria Highlanders FC concepts

[TrueYankee26]

That too!

Kinda random, but just throwing out predictions for what the sponsor would be in future concepts

New Jersey: Prudential or PSE&G

New York City: Citibank

Georgia: Coca-Cola

Los Angeles: 76 Gas stations

Toronto: Scotiabank taken, so it'll be Rogers

Buffalo: Wegmans

Omaha Nebraska: Papa Johns (Manning runs some Papa Johns restaurants, and you know, OMAHA! )

[crashcarson15]

I wanted a Gaelic reminiscent font, not a true Gaelic font for Boston. Didn't want to go full-out for sure.

Anyways, two current MLS concepts coming... made some big changes though. One of these I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I sat down the other... not so much.

Colorado Rapids

No backstory needed here other than that I wanted to get a pair of rivals out of wearing the same damn color home shirt. As it sits now, both Colorado and Real Salt Lake use a maroon/claret shade and it bugs me to no end. So since I like RSL's scheme (for now at least), I shifted my focus towards altering Colorado's colors and went back to what they originally had when they entered MLS sans the black. So, blue, green, and gold were back in as the colors of the Centennial State's flagship team and I simply went about the crest as a recolor job. Thought it worked well enough.

The kits are where things got a little crazy and where I had no idea what I was going to do. I started thinking about ways I could integrate mountain imagery without sublimating it like I did with the 14ers concept and ultimately landed on what you see below. The green is the mountain—i.e. ground or trees—while the blue represents the sky. The gold/white stripe that separates them comes directly from the crest and follows that perfectly. The template is carried onto the socks while the road kit is just a color swap. I felt like I had room to do something crazy here so, well, I did. The Rapids don't currently have a shirt sponsor (or if they did, it's recent because I haven't watched them yet this year) so I kept them without one, though I added the player's number on the front of the jersey because I wanted something to be there. This is either going to be a love or a hate, I feel. Let me know how I did with this one, please.

Vancouver Whitecaps

The biggest disappointment when the Whitecaps came out with their identity a few years back for me was the muted double-blue shade they chose that's also now been used by Sporting Kansas City and to an extent, New York City, especially when they had a set of more vibrant colors to choose from in the past. So I pretty much took the colors from the NASL days and applied them to the current logo and that's that part.

The other thing that I did with the Whitecaps set was to return the broad, center shirt stripe that the club wore in its pre-MLS days. I think it's a great aesthetic and especially with Chicago going away from it (and a more prevalent East/West league split in my version of the MLS), I think Vancouver could very easily use it. Bell remains as the shirt sponsor while the use of the retro Adidas logo is, of course, deliberate here.

Go ahead and tear 'em to shreds in 3, 2, 1...

[1clkgtramg]

Is it bad that I like those retro Whitecaps kits?

[crashcarson15]

Is it bad that I like those retro Whitecaps kits?

I'd hope not, their NASL-era kits are really beautiful.

[DS729]

Those Colorado kits are genius man, love how you incorporated the mountain and it also changes away to a more "exciting" scheme, while the same home kits as RSL don't really bother me, I've never been a fan of Maroon-Light Blue for them. They desperately need to adopt these. Definitely prefer the changes to the 'Caps homes too.

[VictoriaGooner]

I love those retro looking Whitecaps kits...absolutely beautiful. Reminds me of the days of me supporting the Whitecaps when I first moved to Victoria back in 1995. Great work mate

[Soarindude]

I'm just not a fan of the Colorado look. I think the colors just don't go well with the pattern you used. The striping on the kit mixed with the colors would probably look terrible in real life. Just not sold on it. I wouldn't mind seeing a Broncos color scheme or a Avalanche color scheme instead for the Rapids. Surprised the Rapids haven't adopted powder blue more in their look anyway, they already have the rosy red.

Or do they use powder blue? I can't remember.

Edit: Just checked. The logo seems to use the powder blue, but the uniforms have quickly lost more and more blue as the years gone on.

A usually unique color in sports, the MLS has a lot of powder blue/sky-blue. Colorado, Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, and there's one more. That's a lot for a usually unique color/.

[crashcarson15]

I have no idea why I didn't try it keeping something around the current color scheme, actually.

Went with an Avs-inspired color scheme for the Colorado update and really like it—went with the maroon and blue like the Avs and added an "ice blue" type shade.

Probably the quickest update I've ever done on here. Better? Worse? Let me know!

[Soarindude]

Wow. That's absolutely fantastic. I'm glad I said that, because the execution was even better than I thought it was going to be. Definitely an improvement over the scheme you originally used. One of my favorites of the thread.

[VictoriaGooner]

Now that is fantastic Carson!! The colors look great on the kits, especially the ice blue away kits!

[Jaffa]

I think the Rapids update is a great improvement, but they'll still be envious of how gorgeous the Whitecaps are looking. Both those kits are tremendous.