All three LRT pools now online!

With apologies to Kyle Whelliston, who thinks bracket contests are eeeeeevil, my annual “moneyless” pool tradition continues: all three FREE Living Room Times basketball pools are officially underway. Fill out your brackets now!

• NIT Pool: [UPDATE: Polls are now closed!]

• Men’s NCAA Pool: [UPDATE: Polls are now closed!]

• Women’s NCAA Pool: Regular Bracket | Mascot Bracket
Deadline to enter: Saturday, March 20, 10:00 AM Mountain Time

As always, each winner (including, for the first time this year, the winner of the NIT Pool) gets a pool champion t-shirt, and more importantly, eternal bragging rights!

Also: the pool logo will be unveiled around midday Mountain Time tomorrow. If you’d like to submit a logo entry to irishtrojan [at] gmail.com, please do so by 11:00 AM MST.

UPDATE: The logo entries are in, and the winner is… IT’S A TIE!!! Er, sort of.

As you can see above, I’ve decided to use Dan Mowchan’s logo (one of 20 entries from Bonnie Stone’s design classes at Newington High School) as the main pool logo here on BrendanLoy.com, and on the pool champion t-shirts. But I also really love Tom Greca’s logo, and its square shape is perfect for Facebook, so — in violation of every “branding” rule known to man — I’m using that logo on the pool’s Facebook Group. The fonts are pretty similar, so although they’re very different, they could almost be companion logos in some sense.

I should add that I’m really not remotely qualified to be the judge of a design contest, having virtually no artistic skills nor any credentials whatsoever as a judge thereof. I can only pick a winner based on what I subjectively like. The main thing I like about Dan’s logo is that it’s “clean,” simple and straightforward, yet elegant in its own way. The basketballs as “Os” is a nice touch. I also like, especially for purposes of printing it on a t-shirt, that it doesn’t have defined borders (e.g., it isn’t a square). Admittedly, it doesn’t use the LRT’s masthead font, as I’d requested and as some of the others did — but in the end, I liked it better. (I usually don’t really know what I want until I see what people come up with.)

Anyway, many thanks to Bonnie for turning her class over to this effort for the last two days, and for the students for quickly coming up with so many fine entries. Classes at NHS are shortened this week, due to CAPT testing, and I put out my APB for logos pretty late; as a result, Bonnie says, “they just had so many ideas they didn’t have time to complete…so you are not seeing our best stuff!” Ah well, let’s do it again next year, with more time to spare! But as things stand, these are great. Thanks, Dan (who, by the way, is a freelance web designer) and everyone!

You can view all of the logo submissions here. After the jump, you can see both of the “winners,” and a few of the runners-up.

by Dan Mowchan (NHS)

by Tom Greca

by Jeff Morrison

NOTE: Names of the NHS-submitted designs, aside from the winner’s, have been removed for confidentiality reasons. Any student wishing to claim credit for their design, and authorize me to publish their name in connection therewith, please leave a comment or e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com. Thanks!

[Bumped. -ed.]