Let's wrap this up.

Okay everyone. I am getting tired of working on these Winter Classic uniforms. I have been working on these for a few weeks on the blog, plus a week or so before I posted them, and these concepts have been floating in my mind for a few months. Needless to say, I just want to finish these up.

I am going to treat them as straight-up throwbacks, and not include any Canucks branding on them, not even a hidden blue-on-blue shoulder patch. When the Canucks participate in an outdoor game, I predict that they will blend the Canucks and Millionaires brands, and include the Stick in the Rink logo somewhere on the uniform. However, what I am creating are not intended as predictions, they are concepts, and I think that they are indeed better without that logo on them.

Also, with the inclusion of a Winter Classic patch on the jersey, if there were shoulder patches, the jersey could be very cluttered. Most of the "Classic" jerseys have not had shoulder patches for this reason (Detroit's in 2009 being the only exception, although shoulder patches were also added to Chicago's 2009 Winter Classic jersey following the 2009 season, when this uniform began to be worn as a full time alternate).

For these reasons, in addition to many suggestions by respected contributers to leave them off the sweaters, I will leave them off. Instead I have added a generic Winter Classic shoulder patch on all concepts, which was designed by Ryan Haslett, who runs HJC.

Also with the elimination of the shoulder patches I took the opportunity to make the numbers on the sleeves larger, as well as the numbers on the back. I think this adds to the vintage feel.

So with those most recent alterations made, the jerseys, as I see them, are complete (obviously if you have any brilliant ideas, still pass them along). The uniforms are not, though.

The home/dark uniform is perhaps simpler in putting together than the away uniform, because there is an existing Millionaires uniform from which to model them. This home uniform will be as close to a direct throwback as possible. Vintage white (faux-canvas) pants, brown (faux-leather) gloves. However, we do hit a snag when we come to the decision of what the helmet should look like. The Millionaires did not wear helmets, so we have some freedom as to what colour we make them.

For the away/light version of the sweater, I experimented with a number of different options. one thing was very clear from that: having socks which are mainly vintage white does not work, if the socks are not mostly blue, there is simply too much vintage white. As well, I was having some hang ups with using vintage white pants with the mainly vintage white jersey, I thought that huge vintage white area would be a bit awkward, in reaction to this, I created a couple concepts using brown pants instead. I thought they looked pretty decent so I applied the same treatment to some home uniform concepts as well.

I think a plain blue helmet looks best, but a brown one, to create the illusion of a leather helmet could work. I have arranged all the equipment in the way it would look on a player, so we can get a good feel of how the uniform looks as a whole.


Enough talking, on to the concepts:

HOME OPTION 1:

HOME OPTION 2:

HOME OPTION 3:

HOME OPTION 4:

AWAY OPTION 1:

AWAY OPTION 2:

AWAY OPTION 3:

AWAY OPTION 4:

There are two separate polls for you to cast your vote for your favourite version of the home and away uniforms. And, as always, feel free to leave suggestions, or voice your opinions in the comments.

Thanks for stopping by!