I launched FantasyHockeySim.com as a spinoff of DetroitHockey.Net last summer and the visual elements of it were a rush job. Getting the site out the door was my priority, so I stole design elements for FHS from DH.N and put together a logo that didn’t say “fantasy hockey” at all.
Awhile ago I ranted about the Detroit Red Wings’ “Hockeytown” logo and how the only way it said “Hockeytown” was literally, with the text splashed across it. I’d done the same thing with the FantasyHockeySim.com logo, as crossed sticks said “hockey” but the only way it said “fantasy hockey” was via the FHS acronym across the front. Even then, it looked more like the logo for a high school hockey team than for simulated fantasy hockey software.
While stuck on a development project, I decided to take a crack at a new FHS logo.
Because I like shield-based logos far too much, my first pass centered around different shields. Eventually I put together one that I really liked the look of and started building alternate logos around it.
I showed the “final” set (the shield logo and “promotional” versions featuring additional text) around and realized I hadn’t solved the problem I was trying to handle in the first place. The logos still only said “fantasy hockey” literally, and even then it was only the promotional ones.
I stepped back from it and didn’t think about it for awhile until an idea came to me during my drive into work a couple weeks later.
Representing hockey in a logo is easy. Sticks, pucks, all sorts of imagery is available. How do you represent “simulation” though? Well, simulation means computers and code and, even to a layman, X/HTML’s angle brackets are recognizable as code. So I wrapped a pair of crossed hockey sticks in angle brackets and went from there.
The first issue I hit with the logo was that the crossed sticks looked a bit like an X, so I changed their position and added lines representing tape to the blades. After that, I decided to give up on my attempt at a monochrome logo, changing the color of the angle brackets to help separate them from the sticks (with the added effect of appearing as syntax coloring).
As I worked on a primary version of the logo, I also created an alternate version and a “promotional” version. The promotional logo features the “bracket” logo inside a roundel containing the “Simulated Fantasy Hockey” descriptor and the site name while the alternate is simplified version of that, without the text.
The biggest issue with the alternate and promotional logos was making sure the broken inner circle of the roundel didn’t appear like it was supposed to be attached to the angle brackets. To handle that, I shrank down the width of that inner circle and made the break in it wider. Changing the color of the brackets completed the effect.
The FHS site still needs a redesign to get away from borrowing so much from DH.N but at least now the logo is original and descriptive.
