Unfortunately with all of the subreddit moves we've gone through as a community some old really interesting moments and stories have been lost to the auto direct gods and recently I heard someone ask why the TL logo is a horse and I wanted to share this story by /u/TLPlexa from 3 years ago.

I think it's super interesting to read as a long time fan and maybe for our new fans it'll be fun to learn some of our history. Full credit goes to /u/TLPlexa and if you're reading this thank for everything :)

Why is Team Liquid's Logo a Horse?

Ok kids, story time because I'm one of the few people who actually knows the whole story (I wonder if Nazgul can remember all this). Long ago (circa 2001) the website teamliquid.net was created. There's a reasonably famous image by Jim Warren of snow falling down a mountain and turning into horses. Someone decided that it was a cool image and it was used in the banner on the website: https://web.archive.org/web/20040921075239/http://www.teamliquid.net/ and the original image: http://jimwarren.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/afterthestorm.jpg

The original creator of the banner was a guy named Smorrie (nice dude who I got to talk to wayyyyy back). And here's why he chose to do that: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/general/26206-the-teamliquid-banner#12

Because the person who made it was looking around for some cool pic that somehow related to 'Team Liquid'. Then he found this pic with the horses running through the snow and thought it was pretty cool, having the horses together as a 'team' and the snow as uhh 'liquid??'.. So he tried to find a cool pic with some horses running through some water but couldn't find any. It then ended up with using this one and was like "oh well.. snow/water.. s'all the same ;D" and hoped some wouldn't even notice it was snow. It went well with the rest of the sitecolours too so yeah ;o

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Jim Warren actually contacted us sometime around 2008 about us using his image in our banner. He was really cool about it though, only requesting that we credit him for it which we did immediately. You can still faintly see the original banner in the current teamliquid.net banner and the credit to Jim is still in the footer of the site.

Okay so that doesn't explain much, TeamLiquid the team has gone dormant by this point but the site is solidifying itself as one of the major non-korean Broodwar sites. In 2006 we were invited by Blizzard to join in a community-site tournament called 'Sandlot'. Essentially it was a tournament where 8 community sites drafted a team of progamers and then played out a team league with the winning team winning some prizes. The order of the draft was done by ranking the logos of the various community sites. The problem was, TeamLiquid didn't have a logo at this point so we held a community contest for people to submit a logo that would represent us for Sandlot.

The eventual winner of that contest was Jellycat's logo http://i.imgur.com/sEPbM4R.jpg

Now that is a far cry from the logo we have today, so why was it picked? Basically the staff at the time decided that the horse banner had become the defining feature of the site so the logo needed to capture that. The childish-cartoony art style was settled on because it was either going to rank first or last depending on whether the judges got it (spoiler: they didn't get it, we got 7th in the draft iirc). The logo was actually pretty cool because the grass was made of units from Broodwar.

Anyway that went on to being produced as a shirt as our first ever run of shirts for the community. Here's one of the former staff of the site in one of the shirts: http://www.teamliquid.net/images/gallery/22460.jpg

And here is the same staff member with Broodwar pro YellOw at Blizzcon 08 (I believe he played a significant role in Xenics Storm way back) with our second ever shirt which might look more familiar http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/LastRomantic/blizzcon/DSC06331.jpg Again the horse was an essential element of the shirt.

Obviously you can't keep using the Jellycat logo so when SC2 rolled around (mid 2010) it was clear we needed a new logo. (Actually in 2008 we had a serious go at making a logo and failed horribly it was only the urgency of that SC2/the proteam brought that actually got it finished) And so we began the task of coming up with a new logo and updating the site so it stopped looking like something out of 2001. Here are some never before seen prototypes:

• http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/pachi/misc/tl.png

• http://i37.tinypic.com/24orh54.png

• http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/funkie/pony02.png / http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Hot_Bid/2LiquidPodcast/iTLnet.png

• http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Kennigit/TL_Rebrand/Sample1.png

• http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Kennigit/TL_Rebrand/GOOD_1.png

• http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/funkie/revDUNNO.jpg

Eventually suffeli iterated on the last few prototypes to produce http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/suffeli/shieldsz.jpg and http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/suffeli/tllogo.png which you will recognise as the TeamLiquid logo of today.

Well that's all for story time today, hope you enjoyed it.