Is This Your Sharks Logo?

This generic "Sharks" logo is nothing more than a licensable, stock image from Adobe. It's not very creative despite the logo showing the shark very clearly, but that's why a good logo matters. There are certain brands that are legitimately more famous because their logo is instantly identifiable, and this is that lightning that sports teams are always trying to capture with their branding. The San Jose Sharks were one of those teams whose logos and colours helped sell the franchise when they exploded onto the sports landscape in 1991, and a Twitter account sent us back to the months leading up to their reveal as some user-submitted logos were posted!

In the "Living" section of The Mercury News, San Jose's daily newspaper, it appeared that they weren't all that thrilled with one of the original Sharks' logos shown below being the potential logo for the team when the took the ice for the first time in 1991.

Frankly, I'm not sure they would have had the success selling merchadise and selling hockey in the Bay Area if they had used that logo, but we know that the Sharks' executives used their heads and went with a more traditional logo that wasn't just a wordmark.

The "Living" section editor, David Pollak, is probably better known today for his work on the San Hose Sharks' beat for The Mercury News, but he was imploring fans to vote on better logos in his part of the newspaper back in 1991. The newspaper gave seven logos that people could vote on as a potential Sharks logo, and 787 people voted in the poll to see which the fans liked best. The results were published, and we'll take a look at those in a second.

Where things got a little crazier, however, is that 143 people submitted their own logo designs for the Sharks to consider and the newspaper printed a handful of these as well! Thanks to Jonathan Becher, President of the San Jose Sharks and Barracuda, he posted this picture of the newspaper where those logos were displayed!

The column down the right side of the page are the seven logos that the newspaper had people vote on, and they are listed from most votes to least votes from top to bottom of the page. Frankly, there's nothing that stands out as being overly better than any of the others, but the voting saw the underside of the shark forming a circular logo as the winner. Maybe The Mercury News isn't a good place to have logos designed? Journalism, yes. Brand design, no.

Where the fun is seen is on the bottom two-thirds of the page as some of the fan logos were published. Again, nothing stands out as a "can't-miss" logo, but there are definitely some fun designs. The logo shown as #10 feels a lot like the old WHA's Los Angeles Sharks' logo and I'm not sure if there would have been any trademark infringement there, but that's neither here nor there at this point. A lot of the logos look like doodles you'd find on a napkin somewhere, but there definitely is some creativity from the San Jose fans here.

Are there any that standout to you when you see them? Are any of the logos above better than the original Sharks logo? Post any thoughts you have in the comments as I'm sure we can get a discussion going about which are NHL-level logos and which are not. In any case, this was a cool post from Mr. Jonathan Becher, and, if you want more info about the Sharks' first season and how they came to be, I highly recommend watching the video in this article!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!