Considering the power of colours
After seven seasons of underachievement and much more losing than winning, the Vancouver Canucks made a major shift in the organization ahead of the 1978-79 season, swapping their uniforms and going to an ultramodern ‘Flying V’ and futuristic skate logo along with changing their colours.
The reasoning behind the switch was fascinating, and sports columnist Jim Taylor wrote a classic piece analyzing the new uniforms. Here’s an excerpt from Taylor’s column (edited to fit):
Word that the Vancouver Canucks have new, aggressive uniforms has raised a key question in the rest of the National Hockey League: “Which colours do we go around now?”
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.
No. 15 in the standings and No. 1 on your retinas. Schedule them on Halloween, they’ll lead the league in apples.
The Canucks didn’t just stumble into the combination. They hired an American 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. Considering the magnitude of the disasters, that’s not half bad.
Monday morning, the colour sketches in front of me, I phoned Bill Boyd of Beyl and Boyd, the San Francisco firm responsible for the new look.
“The Canuck colours,” he said, “were all wrong. Blue-green is the coolest colour of all. Slows the pulse, reduces aggression, promotes calmness ... psychiatric wards are painted blue-green,” he added. “Encourages tranquillity.” “That’s our team, all right.” It didn’t stop him. “White, being a passive colour induces the least response of all. And green — did you know that in ancient times green — not black, but green — was the colour symbolizing death?”
So far he’d painted this picture of a bunch of dead-looking guys skating calmly around with no aggressive tendencies and a pulse that’s barely registering. “You’ve got great scouts,” I said. “There are physical and psychological differences in people’s responses to different colours,” Boyd said. “You can put a group of people in a room painted bluegreen where the temperature is 58 degrees, and those people will feel chilly. Put the same people in a 58-degree room painted red-orange and they’ll be uncomfortably warm.”
The new uniforms feature a V starting at the collar and working downward to a point in the vicinity of the waist. Boyd dismissed the suggestion that it served as an arrow, with a psychological message that reads “Kick here.”
“V,” he said, “is for Vancouver.” You cannot fool an ad man.
“It’s fortunate, too,” he said, “because it creates the ideal diagonal stripe. All teams have horizontal or vertical strips. 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.”
I hate to argue with science, but the Canucks have always had horizontal stripes, and they’ve been driving us crazy for seven years. But now he was on to my favourite subject: the Canuck crest.
“We analyzed the colours and logo of every team in every major league sport. We gave the Canucks 20 different approaches ... (the skate speeding over the word Canucks) has motion and style.”
Beyl and Boyd had two threehour sessions with the Canuck directors outlining the new colour scheme. It must have been fun explaining that there were other colours 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.