Today marks the 24th birthday of DetroitHockey.Net, my Detroit Red Wings-centric hockey site and the first site I ever created.
Normally the 24th birthday would be the start of the 25th season but in the world of COVID, timelines aren’t what they once were. Nonetheless, earlier today I unveiled a 25th Season logo at DH.N.
I’d been doodling quite a bit in the lead-up to the site’s 24th birthday. I knew I wanted to differentiate the 25th Season logo from the 20th Season logo by putting the “25” front and center, rather than the site logo, but I had a hard time with anything beyond that.
I was trying to avoid using a bounding shape and was focusing on just using “25” and the site logo when I realized I couldn’t make those work the way I wanted to. I didn’t want to do a shield (the DH.N logo) inside of another shield, so I went with a circle as the bounding shape. I felt like the circle needed to be broken up to help distinguish the anniversary logo from the site’s “promotional” logo, so the ribbon came in and the site logo was lowered to break the bounding circle at the bottom.
The ribbon gave a good place for most of the anniversary-related text. Like it is in the site’s “promotional” logo, “DetroitHockey.Net” arches across the top part of the bounding circle.
The four stars across the bottom part of the logo represent the four Stanley Cup Championships the Red Wings have won since the site was founded in 1996.
My one complaint about this is that it feels like there is empty space before and after the “DetroitHockey.Net” text. It’s necessary to have some space to let the individual elements breathe but that feels like just a little too much and I couldn’t figure out a better way to handle it.
