The final divisional contest is here, and, yes, I saved the best for last. Any of the Central Division's three top teams easily could have won some of the other, weaker divisions.
Who is our final round 1 winner? Read on, reader.
5th place: Columbus Blue Jackets
While Columbus manages to create some graphical magic by forming the CBJ out of the ribbon and hockey stick, the overall effect is too busy. The red starred ribbon element comes out of nowhere, as does the star on the stick's butt end, and both leave you wondering what the heck a Blue Jacket really is. (A short Internet search gives the impression the team may be named after an early Indian leader,
"Blue Jacket", which I suppose results in a better name than the Columbus Little Turtles.)
Columbus does deserve credit for good, traditional color choice, as it's hard to go wrong with dark blue and red. The dark blue negative space within the ribbon, however, causes far more visual confusion than if the space had simply been left transparent.
Advice: Decide what your team name means and go with it in a new logo. Or, at the very least, simplify by removing the inner blue fill, the top star, and the hatch marks on the hockey stick.
4th place: Nashville Predators
For an expansion team with a dumb, overly generic name, the Predators have at least latched on to a very specific mascot. The overall execution of the logo is good, and the exaggerations of the size and angle of the saber teeth are smart. Overall, the slant of the animal's head and the angles of its eyes, ears, and mouth work to create a very forward-moving logo while still keeping an overall balanced shape.
The details of the logo are a bit odd, though, with an underlying orange edging that appears nowhere else on the team colors, and a strange stitch-like patch on its cheek. Additionally, while the skin cutaway works to integrate the team's blue, it mostly weakens the otherwise solid outer border and jumbles the sharp contrast of the animal's interior, relative to its border.
Advice: Clean up the interior details, removing the blue and orange interiors and, instead, continuing the gray and light gray horizontal shaping marks.
3rd place: Chicago Blackhawks
These final three teams fought the hardest in the tournament, and the results will likely be the most controversial. The Chicago Blackhawks head is sharply drawn, implementing the color scheme of the team while seeming to fit in with traditionally Indian colors. It's easy to do Native American mascots insensitively, but this excellent depiction avoids the offensive mistakes of some other
similarly named teams.
Ultimately, though, the illustration doesn't quite fit logo constraints. While the varying line widths do properly emphasize some of the facial characteristics, they disappear at smaller sizes (or longer distances), leaving the facial paint on the chin almost looking like clown lipstick. Also, while the yellow thread accent in the hair adds style to the overall drawing, it is slightly overpowering, due to the color contrast and line thickness, diminishing the more important elements, like the eye and feather. In the end, while the Black Hawk logo is to be commended for its traditional-yet-unoffensive illustration, it does not earn a place as the best logo in this strong division.
Advice: Thicken/alter some of the mouth and nose features, possibly remove the yellow line.
2nd place: St. Louis Blues
The Blues benefit from an perfect team name, affording them both an implicit team color and a general music theme (plus an unusual added bonus: they inherit a good stadium entrance song).
The simple note design serves to both get the music idea across and provide a block of color, without resorting to other, newer teams' insistence on extraneous shading or detail. This logo is extremely readable at tiny as well as large sizes, and its slight slant and bold, thick lines emphasize speed and stability. The thick yellow border surrounding the logo does an excellent job of both complementing the blue color while allowing the logo to show up well on a dark or light background.
The wings off the edge of the stem are adapted from the flags of an 8th (or, given the 4 flags, possibly 64th) note. While they add an additional speed reference to the team logo, they also add a new element to the identity, which somewhat dilutes the clean, straightforward theme with elements that are already tied into at least 2 other NHL Teams (the Flyers and the Red Wings). This, however, is the slightest flaw, and essentially the benefit and detriment of the wing detail cancel each other out.
Ultimately what puts the in Blues second place rather than first is the recent (1998, apparently) addition of the thicker white border surrounding the note's yellow border, with a thin blue border surrounding that. This is an improvement over the
earlier ('84 to '88) version that excessively introduced red (and the oddly placed "St. Louis"), but is overall a diminishment of the
cleanest logo, the 1967/68 original. As mentioned above, the Blues logo would easily win in many of the other divisions, but being in the Central, they just miss first place.
Advice: Go back to the original one-border logo. Or try out a simple, non-winged quarter note version.
1st place: Detroit Red Wings
The Red Wings cheated somewhat with their logo, with owner James Norris having "appropriated" it from the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association Winged Wheelers (winners of the 1893 Stanley Cup, and apparent motorcycle enthusiasts), then changing Detroit's team name from the Cougars to the Red Wings. The reasoning behind the Red Wings name, however, is elusive.
In any case (and design theft aside), the winged wheel serves well to depict both the Red Wing and the team's "motor city" Detroit location. The exact details of the logo have evolved over the years (note the inverted shading of the
'73-'84 version), but the overall concept, and general implementation have stayed fairly constant.
The Red Wings logo wins primarily due to its excellent adaptation of a somewhat difficult concept (you must have an object that has wings, of course, but how do you prevent that object from becoming the primary focus?), but the overall job of the illustrator in adding exactly the right balance between the wings and tire, as well as the expert shading of the tire and wings clinch first. The extra thick outer red edge (missing from the
earliest versions) also creates an extremely memorable silhouette. If the logo has any faults, they're in the slightly over-detailed aspects of the mark. Over the course of this logo's history (and, indeed, most logos' histories) the line widths have been made more consistent and any unecessary details has been removed. There remain only one or two small areas for this process to continue in the Red Wings logo.
Given the perfect curve of the wing top and the expertly placed feathers, the slightly jagged edges of the feathers are unneeded, and at smaller sizes only add visual noise. Additionally, the smallest lines of the spokes are lost at far distances, and make the interior of the logo go a bit pink. Even with these minor issues, though, this is a near perfect logo, and can largely remain untouched for the rest of the team's existence.
Advice: Continue down the simplification path, removing the feather jags and possibly reducing the number of spokes (followed by at least doubling their line width).
Congratulations, Detroit, and good luck in the later rounds.
What are your rankings for the Central Division?