A few years back after seeing my headdress helmet pictured below. I was contacted by the Illini to come up with some concepts.
As you all know the school can’t use the Chief anymore so the headdress helmet is probably never going to happen at an Illini game.
We decided to work on some other headdressish concepts to get around the rule. I did a ton of ideas for the team you can see them all here https://www.flickr.com/photos/fourteen85/sets/72157629196443001/ that is my flickr site but here are the highlights
The render isn’t great on these compared to what I do now but these are several years old, Illini people have already seen the and Nike still went with the boring I helmet. One helmet like that maybe, two if you are worried about money but 3 means that they could afford to do one of these helmets. I was told back in 2012 that price was the biggest hurdle to the Illinois script headdress concepts below.
These helmet still have the feel of a headdress but get around the NCAA rules about using the Chief. The final two helmets are a more abstract version of a headdress. All of you Illini fans that don’t like your new uniforms look on the bright side you could have easily been given the much worse Cuse uniform.
