The Calgary Flames have a thing for moving their AHL farm team every couple of years or so. In the last decade alone, they have played as the Saint John Flames, the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights, the Quad City Flames, and last year the team was moved to Abbotsford, British Columbia, basically in the backyard of the Vancouver Canucks.

In Saint John they had an amateurish looking fiery wordmark that was replaced with a kickass dragon after a couple of years. When they moved to Omaha in 2005, they adopted a Knight based identity instead, and again looked great. Once again in 2007, they moved to the Quad Cities, effectively booting out the UHL’s Mallards and going with a fairly uncreative logo (it was just a flaming Q over the top of Calgary’s iconic C). After just two years, Calgary got bored of the Quad Cities so moved their team closer to home, seen by many as a controversial decision that I can’t be bothered to go into (this is logos I’m talking about, after all).

So upon the move to Abbotsford, they held a Name-the-Team contest in which the Heat won out. Oooh, a name that’s associated with but not quite the same as their parent club! This would make for a perfect opportunity for the Atlanta Flames logo to be seen on the ice again! Or maybe they’ll come up with a brand new, amazingly creative identity -

…Oh, maybe not. Just a boring wordmark. What a letdown.

This is kind of like another boring wordmark we covered a while back, only this logo is even more boring. At least the Anaheim Ducks made some sort of attempt to incorporate something creative into their wordmark that’s relevant to the team name: as for the Abbotsford Heat, nothing. There is nothing about this logo that suggests anything to do with heat, or fire. No, the red streak coming from the puck doesn’t count, that looks more like a blur to me.

It’s as if the designer thought “There’s not much you can do with Heat,” opting to resort to the generic easy way out instead: make them a wordmark. Even though the team’s parent club pulled it off very well to create an iconic logo. Even the NBA’s Miami Heat have a good alternate logo, incorporating the team’s initials and using bright, hot colours.

Speaking of colours, this logo doesn’t feel very warm at all. Yes, there is red, but not much of it. The mainly black lettering maybe suggests that it’s been burnt, but for some reason feels cold. There’s also silver, which for this team name doesn’t work. Again, it feels cold, like a piece of metal that’s been left outside in the snow. The colour scheme overall also makes them look more like a Carolina Hurricanes affiliate than a Calgary Flames one.

I really, really don’t know why or how they came up with this. Did they go with a wordmark because it’s a safe, easy and comfortably generic choice? Or were they going for that Charlestown Chiefs wordmark only effect? Would it really have been that hard to throw together a great looking flaming H? And if they were so lazy as to only come up with a wordmark, why not just go with a no-brainer decision to use or even modernise the Atlanta Flames logo instead?

In short, this logo is disappointing, incorporates absolutely nothing to do with the team name except for a bunch of letters spelling it out, and for what is supposed to be this team’s primary logo, is very dull. Boring wordmarks are boring.

I’m Wildwing64, and I declare War On Logos.