How our logo ended up on a Coyote’s head

David Gunnarsson seems like a nice fellow. He lives on a small farm in the south of Sweden with his wife and three kids. He loves Legos and art. According to his web site, David has a “one out of a million mind” that’s the foundation for his success painting custom goalie masks.

You can imagine how flattered we were when David choose to include our SB Nation Arizona web site logo on the custom helmet of Arizona Coyote goalie Louis Domingue.

Gunnarsson posted this explanation for the project on his Facebook page:

Louis Domingue knew what he wanted on his new Arizona Coyotes bucket . He wanted to pay tribute to four legendary sports stars from Arizona.

Randy Johnson. Steve Nash. Larry Fitzgerald. SB Nation Arizona.

Of course, we are humbled to be included in such great company. A pantheon of Arizona sports legends adorning the “bucket” that protects the head of such an important player. The Arizona Coyotes were certainly impressed enough to release this video celebrating David’s work.

But here’s the problem. We respect the work of artists and that includes the one we paid in 2010 to design our logo as part of a network-wide campaign. And our logo has clearly been used on Domingue’s new helmet. You see?

Here’s our logo:

SB Nation / Vox Media

And here’s the top of Domingue’s new helmet:

There really can’t be any doubt that our logo somehow made it’s way into David Gunnarson’s mind, through his skilled hands and onto this lovely helmet now worn by a member of the Arizona Coyotes.

We’re sure it’s just some kind of mistake. David is a nice fellow. He likes Legos. We like legos too! But our lawyers tell us that we can’t just ignore this because of laws about intellectual property and such.

So, I think the only solution here is for Louis Domingue to send us his helmet where we promise to keep it safe in our offices and give it the respect it deserves.

SB Nation 11th Floor, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW. Washington, DC 200036.

And really, we’re very flattered. Let’s all just remain sports friends.

UPDATE:

A response from Domingue: