Whalers Retro

When the Hartford Whalers left town in 1997, it was the end of an era in hockey. The NHL had become a league of "dump and trap" that wouldn't abate until after a season-long work stoppage and badly needed rules changes. In 2004, those changes finally came, opening up the playing surface by removing the center-ice red line (thus reducing two-line pass penalties), giving a competitive advantage to teams and players with speed and skating ability. They have also gotten games out of the 1-0 or 2-1 rut, and the most important occurence of a game is no longer, "Who got in a fight?" We can now look back on those days with a certain sentimentality. But for Whalers fans, those days are all that's left. Still, though, there are many Whalers fans left in Connecticut.

Recently, I ran into the drawing at left, which provides a glimpse at the Whalers' logo design process. The artist who was commissioned for the design was Peter Good, now of Cummings & Good, a graphic design partnership. It's always fascinating (for me at least) to see this idea flow from one concept to the next. Here, the initial stages show an intent to include a negative-space H (for Hartford) to pair with the Whalers W. The design progresses from Poseidon-like hook shapes to a whale fluke. It is still lauded in the logo design community as one of the best designs out there.