PORTLAND – Portland Pirates CEO and owner Brian Petrovek thought about hiring a graphic designer from New York or Boston to create a logo celebrating the hockey team’s 20th anniversary season.

Instead, he walked across Free Street and tapped the creative enthusiasm of the Maine College of Art.

On Monday, Petrovek and MECA students unveiled a logo that the team will use in its merchandise and in all parts of its marketing for the 2012-13 season.

“MECA has been a neighbor and a friend, and we hope this is the beginning of many collaborations to come,” said Petrovek, whose office is across the street from the college’s back door.

The logo features the team mascot, Salty Pete, waving a Pirates banner that promotes the 20th anniversary season. It will appear on team jerseys for a few games during the year, and on all elements of merchandise and promotional materials, including T-shirts, hats, foam fingers and pins.

Season-ticket holders will begin seeing the new logo on ticket renewal forms that will begin circulating this week.

Petrovek likes the logo because it connotes energy and enthusiasm, and because it can be pulled apart and used in many formats and implementations.

“This will be the look that will carry though everything we do when we start training camp next year,” he said. “This will be all you see.”

MECA senior Kelsey Raymond was among a dozen or so students who worked on the project in Samantha Haedrich’s graphic design class. She appreciated the opportunity to work on a real-world marketing campaign, especially one involving a hockey team.

“It was a lot of fun, and it was the project that we were looking forward to the most,” said Raymond, who lives in Topsham and considers herself a hockey fan.

Paige Wojcukiewicz, a senior from Lowell, Mass., said she had fun attending games at the Cumberland County Civic Center as part of her research. “We were inspired by the fans and their flags and how they waved them around and how much energy they had,” she said.

Haedrich split her class into two groups for the project. The groups came up with several options for logos, then refined their work and settled on one apiece. The teams presented their competing choices to Petrovek and his staff.

Petrovek characterized both of the final choices as winners. He called MECA a “world-class institution” and said representatives from Reebok, which will put the logo on merchandise, termed the effort equal to that of a Madison Avenue advertising agency.

“You guys did an unbelievable job,” Petrovek told the students.

This is not the first time MECA students have worked with a local business. For about a decade, the D.L. Geary Brewing Co. has chosen a MECA student to design the label for its Summer Ale, noted college President Don Tuski.

In return for the students’ design work, the Pirates are donating money to MECA that will be used to buy books for the school’s design curriculum, said MECA public relations director Jessica Tomlinson.

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or:

bkeyes@pressherald.com

Twitter: pphbkeyes

 

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