The Hockey Franchise With a Crowdsourced Design Challenge

How a design experiment helped us win a large project

After the Portland Pirates hockey team left Maine to bring their franchise to Massachusetts in 2016, rumors spread that a new hockey team was being considered for Maine. The new team would be filling the space the city, the arena and the fans desperately wanted filled. Ourselves included! At Big Room Studios, we are diehard hockey fans and a couple of us even get out onto the ice once in a while.

Like the rest of the city's hockey fans, when we heard that the new team was crowdsourcing a new team name, we followed the evolution. The most controversial name that was submitted was the "Wild Blueberries". While this name doesn't immediately strike fear into the hearts of the opposing team, it does provide a unique design challenge.

How would you design a logo that takes the simple, sweet and docile blueberry and make it, well... wild!

Although the "Wild Blueberries" name was not the final choice for the team (the Maine Mariners was the winner of the crowdsourced naming competition) we wanted to try working with this brand challenge as an exercise to test our design team and see what we could do with the unusual brand.

Our Creative Director, Justin Varberakis, took on this challenge. He crafted a visual design that took the humble blueberry to a level that is intimidating.

This submission of proposed design work was one of the reasons the Maine Mariners Hockey Team finally selected Big Room Studios to create the final Mariners brand.