Ugh Designing a Uniform.

Every year sports teams unveil their new jerseys. Its a way to re-energize a franchise, make a little extra money and even re invent the way your team is seen by the audience.

A good re-design normally will re-interpret or re-imagine what already works while adding a new twist or simplifying. Very rarely will a team completely ditch their whole look as that is how the fans associate them with their history.

This is all fine, but as an artist in training I will never understand why these teams make the choices they do. Most often the design is either garish or way to similar to something that  already exists. In hockey particularly over the last few seasons it has become popular to make a retro look. One team made a huge profit by using a blue third with kind of a vintage look. The logo in a circle and colored shoulders. Even though the current colors were gold and black the blues were a part of the teams history. Now 3 years later like 5 teams have a blue third with colored shoulders and a circle around their logo. And someone somewhere got paid to do this. Its even sadder because very often there is a fan designed jersey that is just gorgeous but can never be used because of the legal implications.

Its just disappointing because in this day and age cities very much identify themselves with their sports teams so you think they'd be a little more well thought out.