Canuck colors: trick or treat?
Taylor, Jim. The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ont] 30 Aug 1978: P.29.
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Reports that the Canucks might ditch their green, blue and white uniforms have been circulating for months. Most thought they'd follow tradition and change the blue to red. But no, the new look is red-orange, yellow, and black... They hired a U.S. communications counselling firm to find out what was wrong with their old image and come up with a new one, something that would make the customers forget the ghosts of disasters past. For only $100,000 they got their answer... Monday morning... I phoned Bill Boyd of Beyl and Boyd, the San Francisco firm responsible for the new look.
"The Canuck colors," he said, "were all wrong. Blue-green is the coolest color of all. Slows the pulse, reduces aggression, promotes calmness... Psychiatric wards are painted blue-green... Encourages tranquility... White, being a passive color, induces the least response of all. And green -- did you know that in ancient times green -- not black, but green -- was the color symbolizing death?"... Boyd's group has never seen the Canucks. But so far he'd painted his picture of a bunch of dead-looking guys skating calmly around with no aggressive tendencies and a pulse that's barely registering.
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"... To the ancients, blue symbolized saintliness. It was their color of virginity... There are physical and psychological differences in people's responses to different colors... Colors are read by rods and cones in the eyes and the input travels along different sets of nerves... With the Canuck uniforms we are going from the coolest of colors -- blue-green -- to the hottest -- red-orange. The cool color is passive, the hot one aggressive. Plus the black. It's the contrast of colors that creates emotion. White produces no response at all, so we went for yellow -- which is warm, pleasant, happy. Upbeat. What we are attempting to create is an atmosphere that will help create the happy, upbeat, aggressive player -- and, hopefully, the happy, upbeat fan. The Canucks want to provide the fan with an atmosphere in which it's easier for him or her to have fun."
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"V," he said, "is for Vancouver... It's fortunate, too... because it creates the ideal diagonal stripe. All teams have horizontal or vertical stripes. That's static. Diagonal stripes get your attention. They're like the crooked picture on the wall. You have to fix it or it drives you crazy."... But now he was on to my favorite subject, the Canuck crest... "We analyzed the colors and logo of every team in every major league sport. We gave the Canucks 20 different approaches. Mike Bull, a San Francisco illustrator who did the Levi jeans commercials on television and whose work is known to millions, did the one that's been accepted -- the skating speeding over the word Canuck. It has motion and style. It's pop art, sure, but we don't mind the term. Pop simply means popular, doesn't it?"... Beyl and Boyd had two three-hour sessions with the Canuck directors outlining the new color scheme.
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It must have been fun explaining that there were other colors besides red, blue and dollar green... But the job is done -- a job so radical that the patterns had to be made by a flag-manufacturing company and the actual uniforms will be made by firms new to hockey because the old firms aren't geared to handle them... "The fans will love them," Boyd said... And they will -- if somebody in them can win.
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