The History of BlueTights.net – Part 1

Justin Mar 30, 2010

As part of the fourth anniversary celebration of BlueTights.net (back in 2008), I thought it would be fun to make a few posts about the history of BlueTights. With the site now leaving, I wanted to bring those posts over here to preserve the history of that great community. In this first look, I wanted to highlight the logos we’ve gone through in building the BlueTights Network. Most of the old-timers remember these, but I thought it would be fun to look at for some of the folks who came along halfway through our journey.

The Building of the Brand

Throughout it’s history, BlueTights has gone through four real “brandings” in terms of logos. While the name hasn’t changed much, the logo concepts certainly have! I’ve posted each of our logos below, with brief explanations for each:

February 2004 –

pBT-Logo-1

When BlueTights.net started, we were actually called Project Blue Tights. I’ll explain the name and initial concept in a later section of this series, but suffice it to say, I think the logo above makes it obvious that we were about one thing – films. Fan films, specifically. Back then, things were small, and we really had no budget, and I think this logo really reflects the grass-roots nature of what the site was at that time. The name came from a joking suggestion by a user called “SuperHulk.” The joke was a play on the name of a popular indie-film project at the time, called Project Green Light.

July 2004 –

BTN Logo 2

Our first identity didn’t last very long… only about six months. We relaunched the site in July 2004 to coincide with SDCC that year, as well as the release of Sandy Collara’s fan film “World’s Finest.” Part of that relaunch was a brand new logo that I hoped would illicit some of the fun nature of BlueTights. The “Project” had been dropped from the name, and we were now just BlueTights. I still like this logo – now commonly referred to by old-timers as the legacy logo – but it always felt a tad amateurish to me. It was too easy, I guess. Add to that the fact that every other comic community site online has a logo like this, and well… it lost some of it’s excitement. Nevertheless, the logo stuck for quite a while.

March 2005 –

BTN Logo 3
The third version of the BlueTights Network logo has been with us since March of 2005, when Bryan Singer first premiered his video journals on the website. This logo accompanied a slight refacing of the website, and has been with us through a few versions of the site now. Originally inspired by obvious sources, this logo actually took a team to create. Dan-El of Superman-V.com fame and I worked together on this logo for almost two weeks. I know that seems a long time for something like this, but we were obsessive about getting it just right. The curvature was tweaked innumerable times, the coloring, the thickness of the letters. It became an obsession. It started with more of a chrome look, like the original Superman The Movie logo, but eventually we settled on a logo we both really loved, inspired by more recent incarnations like Superman Birthright, and it became the new masthead for BlueTights.net. You’ll also note that this is where we added “network” to the name. It was the beginning of a great idea that would take almost three years to fully realize.

January 2010 –

BTN Logo 4With the closing of BlueTights.net imminent, I asked one of our local favorite illustrators to work up a logo for the community that was a little more similar to the recently rebranded DC Comics logo. With the site’s refocus on all things DC Entertainment, the logo treatment felt more fitting than the Superman-inspired one. While the main website will never carry this masthead, it can be seen on the BlueTights Network Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/bluetights).

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