I recently did a soft rollout of a tweaked logo for DetroitHockey.Net and was inspired to go back and take a look at the history of the logo for the site and its affiliated projects.
I only have backups of my graphics going back to 2002, at which time the site was still drwcentral.net and didn’t actually have a logo. It had a wordmark, though, simply the site’s name in the Concielian font.
At that time the drwcentral.net Fantasy Hockey League did have a logo, though a very simple one.
Those were abandoned in September of 2002 when the site became DetroitHockey.Net and an identity centered around an old English D was created.
The shield is based on an (incorrect) interpretation of the 1926 Detroit Cougars logo, recolored to suit DH.N’s needs. The sticks are a slightly-modified version of those used in the original logo of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (in this version the tape on the sticks has been modified, there was a briefly-used version where it was identical). The DFHL logo is based on an old NHL alternate logo where the league abbreviation appears over crossed sticks in a shield.
In 2005 the logo was tweaked, with the sticks getting straightened out and the red darkened. In addtion, a “promotional” logo featuring the site’s name and year of founding was created, based on an old Chicago Black Hawks logo.
In 2006, the logos were switched up again as the DH.N logo became the old English D over a pair of crossed sticks inside a shield while the DFHL logo took the same shape. Both had “promotional” roundel-style logos with the full site name. Very briefly, the DFHL used a white logo with red text and sticks.
By 2013, the fantasy National Hockey Association had been added to DH.N, affiliated with SportsLogos.Net. To show that the NHA was its own entity but still part of DetroitHockey.Net, another roundel style was created.
This latest redesign is an attempt to tweak things to clean them up just a little. Across the board, the red is darker, the text becomes a little more legible and the roundel logos become consistent. The DH.N shield takes on a sleeker shape and is slightly simplified, with the inner grey border dropped. As there’s now more than one fantasy league on DH.N, the DFHL logo switches back to its old shape to distance it from the primary site, with the text matching that of the roundels. The NHA’s roundel matches the DFHL’s, with the league name in the circle and the DH.N logo at the bottom.
This leaves the DFHL with the following as its logo history (with the briefly-used white logo absent):
The primary site’s logo, excluding the version where the tape on the sticks perfectly matched that used by Anaheim, evolved as follows:
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything remarkable about this but it seemed like a good time to document the changes.
