Reston Raiders
A clipper-ship identity for a youth hockey club, where the nautical thread starts
The Problem
The Reston Raiders, a youth hockey club in northern Virginia, needed a logo strong enough to live on a jersey, a helmet, and a rink banner. "Raiders" can go a hundred generic directions, most of them a sword or a skull. I wanted a mark with more craft than that, one that looked like it belonged to a real program and still held together shrunk down to a helmet decal.
The Work
I drew the Raiders as a three-masted clipper ship under full sail, breaking through the curl of a wave, with a hand-lettered "Reston" riding above a heavy slab "Raiders." Every line is vector, built clean so the mark scales from a stitched chest crest up to a rink board without an edge going soft. I delivered it as a small identity system, not just one file: the primary ship mark plus contained triangle-badge lockups in a dark and a light colorway, so the club always had a version that held up on a navy sweater or a white sheet of ice.
Impact
This is the earliest of my hockey clients, and looking back, it is where a signature started. The clipper ship here turns into the ship's wheel of the Maryland Skipjacks two years later: the same instinct to root a sports identity in something real and nautical instead of reaching for the obvious mascot. A small job, pure logo work, but it set the thread the later clubs are cut from (see Maryland Skipjacks). Independent studio work under Maxim Digital.
Design Gallery
