Courtesy of Sandra McLean/Supplied
On Oct. 9, 1970, the Vancouver Canucks skated onto the ice for their inaugural National Hockey League game. They wore white sweaters with a striking blue-and-green crest on the chest.
The crest depicted a rounded-corner rectangle resembling a hockey rink as seen from overhead. A hockey stick set inside the rink revealed a stylized letter C for Canucks. The tricolour palette was inspired by the natural wonders of British Columbia with green for the forests, blue for the ocean and white for snowcapped mountains.
The logo was not universally popular on its unveiling, as the placement of the stick sowed confusion. Most identified the hockey stick but not the letter C. One disgruntled fan called it “Picasso’s envy.” Fans eventually embraced the design as the “stick in rink,” which has come to be seen as another exemplar from Canada’s golden age of modernism in graphic design.
The Canucks’ livery was the creation of Joe Borovich, a young, freelance advertising designer who lived for a time in a basement across the street from the team’s home at the Pacific Coliseum.
For Mr. Borovich, who has died at 86, the Canucks logo was by far his most famous work, as the club joined the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs as a third Canadian franchise in what was then a 14-team National Hockey League. The graduate of the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design) also designed commercial packaging for everyday items.
“It was a real thrill to see the players skate onto the ice for the first time wearing the jersey I’d designed,” Mr. Borovich told the school’s alumni magazine in 2008.
The uniform was abandoned after just eight seasons, and for a time Mr. Borovich stopped following the team. The old sweater was revived for the club’s 40th anniversary, becoming popular with a new generation of fans. The team’s current sweater includes his logo as a shoulder patch.
Joseph Thomas Borovich was born in Vancouver on Feb. 21, 1939, to the former Regina (Gina) Vlahovic and Tomislav (Tom) Boroevich, a fisherman. Both parents were born in a Croatian port village in what was then Austria-Hungary. The son later dropped a vowel from the spelling of the family name.
As a boy, Joe Borovich used an unlocked exterior door to the steam room to sneak into the stands of the Forum, a hockey arena a few blocks from his home in east Vancouver, where he cheered for the original Vancouver Canucks of the Western Hockey League, a professional minor-league circuit.
He boxed as a member of the local St. Helen’s Athletic Club and, at 6 foot 4, played tackle for Notre Dame College’s football team, helping make local history when the Catholic high school flew to Seattle for an exhibition game, the first Vancouver school to travel by airplane.
Joe Borovich and his grandsons at Hastings Racecourse in 2023.Courtesy of Sandra McLean/Supplied
Mr. Borovich later attended the ArtCenter School in Los Angeles before returning to British Columbia to establish himself as a commercial artist. Among his clients were Mr. Noodles, Murchie’s Tea and Block Bros. Realty. He also designed beer labels for Tartan Brewery, founded by colourful entrepreneur Ben Ginter of Prince George, B.C., as well as the packaging for a contraption that aided in the squeezing of the contents of toothpaste tubes.
The American owners of the new Canucks franchise received hundreds of logo submissions from 80 professional firms, as well as contributions from amateurs. Mr. Borovich showed his unsolicited design to his friend, Greg (Dr. Sport) Douglas, the team’s publicist.
Mr. Douglas recalled thinking at the time: “I don’t know if that is going to work or not.”
He was soon won over.
“I didn’t realize he had formed that C for Canucks. After he explained it to me, I was sold on it, too. Once you point out Joe’s C, that’s all you can see.”
The owners, Tom Scallen and Lyman Walters, were overwhelmed by the colour scheme, which they considered to be true Canadiana, Mr. Douglas recalled.
Mr. Borovich, who created the work on spec, was paid $5,000 (about $40,000 in today’s dollars) for the crest. A brief newspaper item at the time reported he earned an extra $500 from general manager Bud Poile by threatening to take the club to small-claims court.
The original logo was abandoned by the team before the 1978-79 season. New owners got a San Francisco company to design an aggressive look for a reported $100,000. The resulting black, red and gold uniforms with large Vs on the chest and arms were widely derided at the time as garish and gaudy.
When a slightly modified version of Mr. Borovich’s logo was reintroduced as a shoulder patch in 2007, the designer informed general manager Brian Burke that his contract had been with the team’s original owners and not the club. He earned another $10,000 payday, as well as a season ticket each for himself and his wife.
While many hockey logos more typically resemble heraldic shields, Mr. Borovich’s pure, simple design captures a moment in Canadian visual culture, said Blair Thomson, who maintains Canada Modern, an online archive of modernist graphic design in the country.
“What’s so good about it, intentionally or not, is that it sits at the intersection of modern clarity and symbolic economy,” Mr. Thomson said. “It still feels relevant and fresh.”
Three years ago, Mr. Borovich published an open letter to Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini criticizing the club’s many brand changes.
“Tradition and pride in the uniforms are a bit of a stretch with your teams,” he wrote. “What are you trying to do with the image of the team? The smart look of a consistent logo and jersey creates a tradition and history, giving team players pride when they put it on like, for example, in Montreal, Toronto, Boston and Detroit.”
Mr. Borovich died on Dec. 31. He was 86. He leaves two stepdaughters and two grandsons. He was predeceased by his second wife, the former Jean Luella McWilliam, his spouse of 40 years, who died in 2022, aged 76.
Ten years ago, Mr. Borovich told hockey writer Iain MacIntyre that he had a wish for the Canucks. “One day I hope before I drop dead,” he said, “they’ll win the Stanley Cup in that uniform.”
The Canucks have not won hockey’s prized trophy in the 55 years since Mr. Borovich’s design was first painted beneath the ice surface of the Pacific Coliseum. Indeed, his death came during the midst of an 11-game losing streak, ineffectiveness being one of the team’s consistencies over the years.
Even ardent Canucks fans were unfamiliar with the mostly anonymous Mr. Borovich. In 2023, he was invited by Mr. Douglas to make a presentation in the Winner’s Circle at Hastings Racecourse after a featured race. He was told to wear a hockey sweater with his design on it. When his presence was announced, he was mobbed by well-wishers who posed for photographs and asked for autographs. Mr. Douglas said he turned out to be “a bigger hit with spectators than the winning horse.”
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