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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
For just nice designs? The Astros a couple of years ago went to that sort of terra cotta color pallette that I really like, when they moved into Enron Field -- if it's still going to be called Enron Field. Coming up this year, the Angels, after wearing those ridiculous pinstripes with the wing coming off the A and the fake vest look, and color sleeve, they've gone back to a much more traditional style this year, so good for them. They've got a really nice look.
What else? In baseball, I'm totally down on the pants coming down to the ankles thing, but I do think that the reaction to it -- the players bringing the pants [hem] all the way up to the knee -- while it's not my favorite look, it's a nice look. All sock is better than no sock. And if more [players] do it, I think it may actually lead to more teams coming up with something designy for their stockings. Instead of just a solid color, put some stripes in there or something like that.
I was watching a game from the '87 Series on ESPN Classics the other day, and they still had the stirrup socks.
Right, everybody had the white showing through.
And I was saying to my wife, "Don't they look much more like ballplayers than the guys with the pajamas coming down to the shoes?"
Right. That's the thing, they look like footy pajamas. Whatever style you favor for that kind of thing, what's interesting to me, and should be interesting to anybody involved in these sports, is that the whole notion of a uniform is that it's uniform. And here's an element that is completely nonuniform. It's an element where players are allowed to impose their own style on it.
You know, it's interesting that the National Football League has its uniform police making sure that players have their pant legs pulled down and their socks pulled up, but baseball doesn't seem to mind. As I noted in one piece, the Yankees infield last year had four players with four different pant and socks styles. If you looked at them from the knees down, you would never guess they were on the same team. It's interesting to me that there's this one little area of self-expression that's allowed.
What about some other sports? Something I've noticed about hockey lately is the logos on the front of the sweater, the newer ones, like the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Minnesota Wild and the Los Angeles Kings' redesign, are really busy, so that if you get 10 feet away it just looks like a smudge.
Yeah, they're not just simple graphic symbols. I think that just speaks to the possibilities of logos that are all designed on computers nowadays instead of on the drafting table or something like that. Also, it's all part of that information overload thing. People like busy, I think. Certainly, throughout the design realm, not just in sports, you see a lot more examples of overdesign than underdesign.
A lot of times when I cover these sports, there's a lot of stuff that I hadn't noticed because I hadn't thought about it before. In hockey, one thing I've been noticing a lot lately is the jersey neckline. Way, way back, most teams had the lace-up collar, which a few teams have now gone back to. Most teams now have a V-neck collar. A few have introduced this sort of extreme V-neck -- it almost looks more like a Y than a V. A couple of teams, I think the Nashville Predators were one of the first to do it this year with one of their alternate jerseys, have got a square collar.
You can see that the design of the collar has affected the actual physical construction of the entire jersey. The yoke had to be done differently, and that affects how the sleeves had to be sewn in. They made a big fuss over the fact that they have the first square-collar jersey in the National Hockey League. And it's like, all right, good for you guys.
I think what the NHL is doing is actually pretty interesting because usually, change has to do with logo design, but in this case, with the Predators, it's also about construction and physical design of the shirt. They're using the alternate jerseys, or the third jerseys, as they call them, as a sort of testing ground for new logos, which they then sort of subsume more fully a year or two down the road, into their identity system.
