No, the Utah Hockey Club didn't steal its logo design

Over the last few months, NHL's Utah Hockey Club has run multiple surveys asking fans for input on its permanent brand identity. After almost a million votes, the team has finally revealed its new name – Utah Mammoth – and a brand new logo. But the latter has unexpectedly turned into something of a (hockey) sticking point.

Shortly after the logo, which features the head of a mammoth along with Utah's Wasatch Mountains, was revealed, the team was accused of plagiarising a fan concept. Which wouldn't exactly be the way to go designing one of the best logos.

Back in February, an X user named Blue Shells Hockey posted three concept logos that are indeed strikingly similar to the final design. These blend elements of both a mammoth and a yeti, and feature the mountains in the background. "The official logo is way too similar to these concepts. This person needs to be compensated!” One X user commented, while articles popped up sharing accusations of plagiarism.

However, it turns out those three concepts were in fact based on a concept shared by Utah Hockey Club even earlier. When the team was yet to decide on its name and logo, it shared one design to accompany the name 'Utah Mammoth' which, yep, looks exactly like the final design, and the concept shared by Blue Shells Hockey.

As the accusations blew up, the artist did step in to explain. "I’ve deleted this post because there was a pretty gnarly misunderstanding going on. My logo was a revision of the test logos that Utah used for the early voting. I combined the Yeti and Mammoth concepts—which ended up being very similar to the final."

So there we have it, the Utah Mammoth logo wasn't stolen after all. But of course, accusations of design theft are ten a penny in the design world these days – just take a look at the wildest logo design disputes we've seen recently.