@feors: the concept revolves around hockey materials. the mesh in the background is from the common fabric the skate boot is finished in, or more obviously, jersey cloth, or a glove. the steel would come from the skate blade or the steel holding the plexiglass. it's also a theme carried into the mcdonalds 2007-2008 hockey cards and upper deck series.

reebok has taken over from nike as the face of the nhl. they did all the new jersey design, and the rough, cutting edge look is what they used all throughout their hockey campaign: http://en.rbkhockey.com/. the logo was also requested to be text only to follow the rbk image reebok has created.

as for concept exploration, this is one of about 16 designs we came up with. the keyword we were given to design around was intensity. we did the typical ice/puck/rink ideas too and the feed back we got, and i quote, was "don't think to ****ing cliched".

i used to have nice subtle ice textures in all the content areas and the menu, but i was asked to kill any graphic that wasn't "necessary" for download performance - i would have lost all the widget title graphics too but marketing kept fighting for them.

i appreciate the feedback, but the first version was full of ice cliches and it looked as generic as it sounded. if anything, the design is stronger because only hockey people get it. to the regular user, it's just graphic intense. to the passionate hockey fan, they'll pick up on all the subtleties which will hopefully entice them into becoming a participating member because we are as anal about the details as they are.

as for the logo, it's 1 of about 30-35 concepts (seriously). they wanted a RBK like logo. it's stil up for review in the spring, but i doubt it'll change much.


cheers all. glad you like it. we're going to be revamping the user profiles and working on a lot of new functionality, so hopefully i'll be throwing things up over the cours eof the summer.