Nine-Banded: Picto-Canada Edition

This week’s edition of *Nine-Banded* looks at three of Team Armadillo’s side passions. Yes, it’s true when we’re not coding Drupal modules, pushing pixels in photoshop or cursing Apple’s XCode, we’re probably checking out the latest sports news, the newest CDs and of course catching up on the latest political happens with our good friends John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

So this week’s Nine-Banded is dedicated to the fascinating intersection of design and our side passions.

1. The SBNation Redesign

“SBNation is a network of over 360+ sports blogs”:http://www.sbnation.com/, which provides individual coverage for each of the major teams of every single North American professional league. Last month, SBNation redesigned their entire network. While a redesign of this nature is inherently monumental, they also decided to redesign the logos and branding of all 360+ sites. Of course to provide a more concise symetry between the entire network, “this task was assigned to one single designer and he had seven weeks to complete the project”:http://product.voxmedia.com/post/31278489516/sb-nation-united-the-big-rebrand.

Check out the video below for more information.

Take a step back and think about that for one second. On average, a logo redesign takes about 3-4 weeks of work to really nail down, while Davidson had less than 7 weeks to put together 360 logos together. Absolutely Incredible.

2. CBC’s Canadian Pict-o-Bands

Last week we stumbled upon “CBC’s Canadian Pict-o-Band”:http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/10/Pict-o-Bands-guess-the-Canadian-musical-icons blog post. In it, the designers and music bloggers at the CBC crafted a beautiful “poster of 24 pictograms symbolizing some of Canada’s most famous musical talents”:http://static.music.cbc.ca/v2/blogs/images/33/33355/Pict-o-gram-pop-up.jpg. To say it was a hit in the office and within our circle of friends would be an understatement, as much of last week’s inter-office gchatting revolved around trying to figure them all out.

So if you have some time, take a run at it. To start you off, let’s just say that *Nickleback*, *Buck 65*, *Blue Rodeo* all make an appearance … and yes, contrary to my foolishness the two _naked ladies_ are NOT folk/rock duo Tegan and Sarah.

3. 74 Beltway Insiders

“New York Magazine recently asked 74 Belt-way political insiders on their take on the 2012 Presidential race”:http://nymag.com/news/politics/elections-2012/polls-2012-10/. They were asked to answer a series of questions in an anonymous manner to provide insider insight into the election. And while this sort of information is fascinating to hardcore politicos, for us, the intriguing part was the editorial decision to reveal the answers within a series of jagged infographics.

By leveraging a series of sharp, yet at sometimes awkward infographics to reveal the answers, it changes the entire atmosphere of the piece – from a formal poll to a more whimsical and approachable set of answers.

4. The Shadow League Sirens

Our good friend “Cam Hoff”:http://www.twitter.com/camhoff is an avid Baseball fan and in so got us hooked on New Era Baseball hat designers “The Clink Room”:http://www.theclinkroom.com/. These guys specialize in creating customized New Era Baseball hats and logos for Minor League Baseball Teams across North America. This past week they released the first in a series of _fantasy_ team designs for “The Sirens”:http://shop.theclinkroom.com/products/sirens.

As an avid lover of sport design in general, the Sirens logo, although not a real team logo, is just a stunning design. To make it that much better the whole hat combo is just really well done.