War On Logos #15: A Chief Offender
Much like I did with War On Logos #10, this time I’ll be talking about another team, based in the UK, that I (or in this case, we) root for with an identity that I find very displeasing (the very fact that this is a UK based team I’m going to be talking about may already be a bad sign). This team also happens to be a long-time rival of another team we covered back in WOL #4, so any fans of that team who have stumbled upon this site might just be pleased to see this.
And before I get started, I’ll introduce this team to those not familiar with them: the Chelmsford Chieftains. Now unlike North America, Great Britain, or for that matter the city of Chelmsford is not exactly home to any Native Americans, so Chieftains is completely irrelevant as a name (although I’m safely assuming they really picked it just for the generic alliteration)… oh, but wait! Apparently the team are named that because back when they were founded in 1987 and still looking for an identity, the players started giving the nickname of “Chief” to their player-coach, and so the name stuck… yeah, kinda lame. And serving as further proof that UK sports team owners suck at naming their teams.
This team could probably be compared to the Vancouver Canucks in that they’ve gone through several different logos and colour combinations over their 23 year existence – the jerseys have changed too, but like many UK teams they change the jersey designs every year anyway, taking another page from football (soccer) so as to further ruin hockey.
Currently the Chieftains seem to have settled on this design, with a Boston Bruins-esque black and gold (orange?) colour scheme:
At first glance, this looks like one of the better logos belonging to a lower level UK team, but that really isn’t saying much. I can’t be completely certain, but something about this logo just screams “generic clipart”, that’s been provided to the team by their jersey manufacturer. And why do I think this? First of all, it’s been recoloured three times in the past five years (from red and black, to burgundy and silver, and finally to black and gold/orange), an even lower level team that plays at Chelmsford, the Warriors, who used the exact same logo even before their affiliation with the Chieftains, and finally, the team’s youth development program again uses the same logo, but with a red and blue colour scheme.
The second giveaway of this possibly being a clipart-type logo is the use of one of the most generic fonts ever, Impact, for the wordmark (We’ve been through this already…). Their junior team, the Warriors, also use the exact same font in the exact same position for their otherwise identical logo. In one this logo’s previous colour schemes, the wordmark had a tacky gradient going through it, which I’m glad to see gone.
Ah yes, gradients. Another favourite element of bad logo design. It’s great that they got rid of the aforementioned one in the wordmark, but why not remove it from all of the other objects that have them too? It’s tacky, and no matter how “awesome” you think it looks, it just doesn’t work, not even for shading. And this is why professional sports teams always go with solid colours for their logos, including any shading that’s needed.
And finally, the designer at some point seems to have gotten lazy. It’s not noticeable when you first look at it, but there’s been a lot of copying and pasting going on with this logo: the feathers are all exactly the same – not that consistency is a bad thing, but it really does feel lazy. They also use the same zig-zaggy line featured underneath the wordmark to act as the middle bit of the feather… but why is that zig-zag there in the first place? I have no idea…
OK, you know what: I’m going to be doing something very different for the next edition of War On Logos. As these teams from Romford and Chelmsford have shown, British hockey teams hardly ever get it right when it comes to their identities, so Instead of ranting about why a logo sucks for a change, I’ll be doing a list of the Top Five things that are wrong with British hockey logos.
Until the next time, I’m Wildwing64, and I declare War On Logos.