Well, I would, as they are heavily based on the one-off shirts from last year, which got an overwhelmingly good reception last year and were highly sought after in auctions and as replicas.
Therefore, I find it somewhat amusing that many fans of other clubs have been having a go at the shirt. Especially, in a sort of irony, the Steelers.
Let us consider that for a moment. The Steelers are saying our shirts are rubbish. From a club that thinks teal and orange work together. A club that designs its shirts under the influence of a cog addiction. Have a browse through some old Steelers logos, the text style changes, or runs up/down the girder then down/up, the bloke behind the girder is regularly redesigned, or becomes the focus, or is moved.
Steelers fans criticising another team for producing an ugly shirt is like The Elephant Man pointing at someone and shouting "Oi! Big nose!"
(Amusingly, I've also seen a posting from a Coventry fan saying the Blaze logo was better than ours. I genuinely wonder what planet the guy lives on.)
Obviously, I'm biased by my fandom, but I really do like the imagery that the Phoenix office has generated. The posters look spectacular and exciting. The "game face" logo is sharp, clear and unlike just about anything else in hockey. Many hockey teams go for the overtly cartoonish, like the Anaheim Ducks or the new San Jose logo.
The Phoenix "dynamic logo", to give it its true name, is two tone, simple, vibrant stuff. Not cartoonish, but still distinctive. It scales well, from a full size hockey shirt down to a small image on a polo shirt. In short, it works better than 99% of logos, across the whole spectrum of merchandise and uses.
A little story
Which reminds me: the name for the logo. It has been referred to as "Game Face" for a while, and it pops up in discussion and on the forum. This is because the original T-shirt was marketed as such, "putting on your best Phoenix game face".
I'd love to say that "gameface" was the product of a lot of thought and many meetings, possibly involving flipcharts and whiteboards. Nothing could be further from the truth. What actually happened was I received a bunch of merchandise images through the email, with the instructions to put them online for sale in the merch section of the website.
Each of the images was labelled something like "t-shirt 1 front", "t-shirt 1 back" and so on. So I had to come up with some name that would be meaningful to the customers. This wasn't too difficult, simply use the text on the t-shirt, "JustICE", "Made in Manchester" etc etc. What stumped me was the new logo one, which I loved immediately but had no text.
It won't surprise you that I play music while I work at the PC, and I had iTunes on in the background, throwing out some random RAWK. I'd played Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness" and the next track is called "Violence Fetish" and the intro to chorus runs...
"Step right up and be a part of the action
Get your game face on
Because it's time to play
So there I am, pondering it, and the phrase stuck. I uploaded the images, emailed the Phoenix office and said something like "I've called it 'Game Face' - no doubt you'll have a better name for it. Let me know."
They never did.
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