2011-2012 NHL Colors Scales Super Turbo Bonus Edition: The Rejects

If you actually read all the crap that I wrote then you know that there were several colors retired before the start of the 2011-2012 season. Instead of just dumping them into a lonely pit of silly names and broken dreams I compiled them into a single sad block.

And here is it, with all the glory of a Wheatley designed test chamber, the rejects of 2011:

Nashville has totally eschewed silver this season, and having seen the gold jerseys we should all be grateful. I couldn't picture actually look at another human being in direct light without being afraid of severe retinal damage due to the combination of silver and eye-bleed banana peel gold. Still, at least no one has to worry about the eye twisting purple and gold combo. I was under the impression that outside of film buffs everyone was glad that the 80s had died, but for some reason hockey fans pine for the NHL equivalent of leg warmers and Miami Vice. We also got to witness True North taking the Thrashers colors out back and shootin'em right in their cutely named hues. 

Oh, the Islanders also retired a color but no one cared.

If at any point some color seems off or flat out wrong, then please don't bother emailing me. My goal is to stick this little scale here for my own entertainment, and since the colors are retired I'm not terribly concerned with perfect accuracy. Thanks

2011-2012 NHL Color Scales: Red & Blue

And so we have reached the final color scale. I do plan on releasing all of these on a single page so that people can have them or fiddle with them or whatever it is that people do when they are downloading pictures off the internet. Today we have the two largest scales in the Red and the Blue scales. People often talk about how overused these colors are in the league and this pair of scales really demonstrates how extensive the use of blue and red really are. It isn't terribly surprising since blue and red are often tested as the two most popular colors in the world. In case you're curious, orange is often picked as the least appealing color, go figure. If this is your first time looking at these scales I invite you to go back and take a look at the first two entries for the rest of the the scales in the series: Green, Purple, & Natural and Orange, Silver, & Gold.

And since both of these are so long, you can find them both after the bump if you navigated here via the main page.

2011-2012 NHL Color Scales: Orange, Silver, & Gold

Ok, time for the second round of color scales. As the scales get longer things get more interesting as you can see what has been added and dropped for the start of the new season. The three that I'm posting today consist of the Orange, Silver/Gray, and Gold scales. If this is your first time here then I want to point you back towards the first entry where you can find part one of the series.

EDIT: It just occurred to me that the Islanders haven't unveiled their new third jerseys. If there is one team in this league that I'm not going to wait on it would be the New York Islanders. If there were two teams it would be them and the Red Wings. I stuck this edit here because the jersey is supposed to include grey, which would fall on the silve scale.

Orange Scale:

So, I lied a little bit because not much happened in the world of Orange. Really the only change that we have is that the redish toned orange that the Flyers have employed since 1999-2000 has been totally retired in favor of the brighter orange from the heydays of the franchise (or the years when they won those shiny Cups).

2011-2012 NHL Color Scales: Green, Purple (sort of), & Natural Tones

Back in December of 2010 I sequestered myself in my apartment for an entire weekend working on a single, time consuming project. Granted the only difference between that weekend and my typical weekend is that I spent less time sprawled on my office floor mumbling the lyrics to Off With Their Heads songs. Still, it was an incredible fulfilling project that several people got very excited about but was ultimately ignored until someone did the same thing only with a pretty but useless presentation that got linked on Puck Daddy. Ultimately I found myself undaunted and moved ahead with updating my color scales for the 2011-2012 season. Now that all of my somewhat pretentious angst is out of the way I can go ahead and start breaking out the scales.

If at any point some color seems off or flat out wrong, then please email me at puckandpunk [at] gmail [dot] com. My goal is make this as accurate as possible and I'm always happy to accept input. Thanks

The Complete NHL Color Scale

Though I've been meaning to compile all of my colors scales into a single image for a while, I finally was able to blink away the color boxes that had been burned into my retinas and actually do it.  Below you'll find a pretty high resolution image that contains the scales, complete with labels and dividers for easy viewing.

Looking back on this project I have to say I'm pretty please with how the product turned out.  Being able to pull all the various colors out of their respective team contexts and just perusing them was a ton of fun.  If this is your first time looking at these scales, then I invite you to look back at my commentaries (Blue; Red, Gold, and Orange; Purple, Green, Gray, Natural), although just interpreting them for yourselves is a great exercise and a lot of fun.  Once again, thanks to The Hockey Uniform Database for making my life so much easier.  

The Complete NHL Color Scales

The NHL Color Scale: Blue

Don't forget to check out the rest of the series: Red, Yellow, and Orange and Purple, Green, Gray, and Natural

I broke my furious blogging pace to work on a project that's actually taking some serious time.  I happen to really love color.  I spent a decent amount of my time in psychology consuming and analyzing all I could about how we process and are effected by color.  You look at the hockey world and the NHL is ablaze with more color than even many hardcore hockey fans would admit.  In the spirit I set out to create color scales for all of the major colors that we see on NHL jerseys.

All of the colors I used were extracted from the galleries over at one of the best, and possibly my favorite, hockey jersey resources NHLUniforms.com.  To do the extraction I used a Google Chrome extension called Color Pick.  The colors that I'm looking at ignore those found in crests and patches and focus only on the body of the jersey.  And below I present a break down of the use of the most popular color in the entire NHL, blue.  A few things to note: Nashville's third jersey and New York Rangers's third jersey use a navy blue that is barely different another blue that is actually the most popular shade in the entire league.  If you've got good eyes or a good monitor then you can likely zoom in and see the line between the two Navies.  What I also found interesting is huge differences between all the light blues found on the various third jerseys.

This is just the first of color scales that I produced.  I choose to post the blue scale by itself due to its size.  As the week goes on I'll post more of the scales.