Tag Archives: sports

Illustration

The Little ESPN Tattoo that Never Was

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ESPN Magazine contacted one of our sister companies, a printer of temporary tattoos, and asked if we could design a tattoo for one of their articles. They asked for an 8″x10″ white tattoo made up of all sorts of NFL plays to put on a players arm for an article about them. Which player? I’d love to know, and an 8″x10″ tattoo would pretty much wrap my bicep. I suppose that means it could have been any player in the NFL [wah wah wah]. In the end, they must have gone with another idea, though it would have made a great photo. I went through a half dozen versions to end up with this one that was approved, but never was used.

Credentials/Passes, Events, Personalization

’10 Credentials for University of Arizona Football

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These credentials led off my design style for the 2010-11 school year with the white outline and shadow and nearly white background [I’ll be posting the rest of 2010 soon enough]. The design carried the red and blue colors well, while highlighting the players. With the thin white outline [like a paper cut out] the players were both frozen in a moment in time as well jumping out of the noise and chaos of the game and stadium. Add in a bit of a reverse glow darkening the inner edge of the player and the effect was complete. Why make attractive credentials? One was help bring the look of the program up a notch [every little bit helps] as well as making keepsakes. There was just one hangup — these sports credentials were beginning to get rather complex, both in amount of unique credentials as well as their ability to be easily identified by security personnel. For each game, there were 11 different credentials to keep track of [a total of 84 unique credentials for the season] and though they are attractive, a bit of functionality was lost.

I’ll spare you the numbers, but 4 All Season passes for All Access, Photo and Media, and then 11 game specific credentials with 7 games played made for 84 unique credentials with each set getting a unique set of numbers [per game]. It is a good thing to have some personalization software to add into our page layout application.

All this to say the credentials were produced without a hitch, and another exciting football was had.

Design Process, Illustration, sketches

El Tour De Tucson ’06 Poster and Jersey

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Tucson is well known as one of the best cycling communities in America. Pro cyclists [and triathletes] come to train here, and many move here for the year-round training that our weather provides. Well, we’ll take a ding for the summer, but you just need to get out early in the morning to get in your miles. The Perimeter Bicycling Association of America Inc. [based in Tucson] puts on several events each year, with November’s El Tour de Tucson being the largest. With about 9000 cyclists each year, there is a mix of top-level athletes as well as thousands that set the 108 mile event as there goal and spend the prior months getting into shape to reach that goal. Starting in August there are more and more cyclists out on the roads on the weekend, all in their brightly colored jerseys. Being a cyclist myself, I applaud everyone for making the effort to get into shape. Being healthy is a good thing.

Starting with the Lance Armstrong poster in 1998, I have designed 6 El Tour de Tucson posters and 2 Tour de Phoenix posters. Some are painted traditionally, some have been done entirely on the computer, and the poster for 2006 was a bit more of a line drawing. Every year the process is mostly the same: work on coming up with some promising sketches, and once approved, complete the poster and then make modifications from there. I have always wanted to make some miniature cyclists riding on a cactus, so that is where I started, trying out a few color variations.



The colors seemed to be okay, but the sketches didn’t strike anyone as all that impressive, even though the thought was to paint the poster. That would be hard to mock up without completing the poster – far too many hours on the chance that it may be accepted. I moved on to pencil sketches for the composition and this was chosen — not a whole lot of detail. [click image for a higher resolution version]


Taking that sketch, I made a quick series of color mock-ups and I was given the green light to go ahead. As a side note, that is always a good thing to get, especially when there is not that much to look at.

I redrew the branch and inked it in for a clean-but-rough line, scanned it in at a very high resolution and auto-traced it in Adobe Illustrator. Then came the fun of keeping the art to 5 spot colors and coming up with an attractive design [more on the 5 color limitation in a bit]. After a fair amount of work, 5 colors that worked well together were chosen and the artwork grew into a warm/sunlit side and a cooler shadow side. [click image for a higher resolution verison]

Here is an enlarged version of the nine cyclist bugs, which I also printed out as die-cut stickers on our large format printer. For the kids race, my kids had these stickers all over their bicycles and helmets. There is a bit of a petroglyph feel in these bugs.

The mountains around Tucson were added with the same warm/cool color selection, and because of a time crunch all three branches were the same illustration with the branches recolored. That would be the one thing I would change if I had a chance: the branches and the bugs all needed to be unique. No two bugs alike. Ah well. Most people don’t realize they are all the same until I point it out [I am sorry if I ruined the magic].

After several attempts to fit all the text on the poster in an attractive manner [I love my typography – I believe that is what sets my poster design apart from many of the other posters] I matched the curve in the text at the top with a blue notch at the bottom. It was a hit. But I wasn’t done…

The El Tour folks needed the clothing to match the poster, which is why there was a 5 color limitation. Granted, I was allowed to blend the colors together which was probably a bit of a nightmare for the production artist at the clothing manufacturer. Several comps were created and this one was selected way back at the beginning of the process. Rough, but it was a good direction.

Once the poster was complete, the design had to be reworked to fit into all the different sized patterns. The mountains were too busy so they were dropped out and just the ocotillo branches and bugs were left.

Here is a close up version of the jersey pattern. The art had to fit the smallest jersey as tightly as possible so that the text wouldn’t look like it was floating in the middle of branches and thorns. Pockets were taken into account, and on the front there was the issue of the zipper.

This shot was sent to us from Squadra, the clothing manufacturer. Jerseys, jackets, shorts, and socks were all part of the package — and they sold out, making it one of the most successful jerseys ever. That means I did my job — it was both an attractive design and a successful product for Perimeter Bicycling. As a bonus, I get to see my jerseys being worn all over town. They are most definitely bright and eye catching. [click on the image for a higher resolution version]

Credentials/Passes, Events

10 Years in the Making

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We’ve made it to the Sweet Sixteen and more. One could say this may be some payback for the 2001 loss to Duke in the championship game, but it may just be better to say that Arizona played one of the best second halfs EVER and transformed Duke from a never-ending powerhouse into a handful of guys that looked lost on the court. *whew!*

If anyone remembers the old NBA Jam video game [they have a new version out now] there were two frequently repeated phrases in the game. “He’s on fire!” and “He can’t buy a bucket!” – we were on fire last night. Let’s hope that fire continues.

The credentials for the previous year had exactly that – some flame action going on. Here are a handful of the credentials, as well as a look into the process of coming up with them.

How much flame is too much flame? Where does “Staff” and the year go? Believe me, there were plenty more iterations than just the few shown here.

On a few of the credentials we went with wood from the court, but should it be Arizona red or more like the original wood?

Credentials/Passes, Events

PAC-10 Champs & March Madness!

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A day after the University of Arizona men’s basketball team became the PAC-10 champions and finished an undeafeated season at home I happened to bump into a friend visiting from  Cincinnati. He works with the athletes at Xavier where we pulled their coach. “Thanks for letting us have you coach,” I gleefully told him. Who would have thought that Arizona would be back to being competitive so quickly? Not I. We are back to the big dance, and who knows — maybe we will put in another 25 year string of appearances.

Each year we get to create the credentials for many of Arizona’s teams, and we put a bit more into the job as it is our team as well. In the end, there are individual credentials for a myriad of positions and sets for both season-long and game-by-game passes. If you are thinking of being sneaky, good luck with that — not only do we shred everything that we don’t ship, but we create identification sheets for the security members at the games. Did we mention that we also apply barcodes on credentials? We want everything surrounding the games to be safe, as well as look good [because that is what we do].

Good luck in both the PAC-10 Tournament as well as the big dance — here is hoping that we at least make it into the sweet sixteen!




Credentials/Passes, Events

’09 Football Credentials

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With the credentials for 2010 wrapped up and in production, we can now show you last year’s credentials. We take security very seriously and didn’t want to take the chance of the 2010 credentials looking even remotely similar as to 2009. BUT, you really must attend a game this year and check out the 2010 versions as they are going to be great.

This all goes back to our desire to not just make good design but to make everyone else look good as well. We want the athletic department to look good, that people coming from other schools to a game and being given a credential will look at it and think, «whoa, this school is top notch». Granted, we take on all kinds of design work and we try hard to make everything we touch look good, but this is also our hometown team – we take pride in what we can do to help out.

Included below are a few of the dozens of credentials we create for each game, as well as a few large versions of the credentials without the required text. They would make for a nice set of playing cards.






Maybe we should be a bit more impartial, but having a UCLA player being bowled over on their head — it makes us smile.







Credentials/Passes, Events

UofA Baseball and Softball Credentials

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We continued with the look we created for the University of Arizona Athletic Department for the media and staff credentials for both baseball and softball. Each was individually numbered and an additional credential was made for the televised game as well [Arizona is good – we expect the addition of more televised games soon]. We would recommend catching one of the ballgames in our «rough» Tucson weather.