M.Willis - Art, Design, Soccer, Tech

It Has to Be Brighton

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:39:00 -0400

You can only really love one club. Sure, you can appreciate many, have affection for a handful, understand several deeply, and even root heartily and honestly for a few. But you can only truly love one.

Association football tests this theory. There are so many registered clubs – at multiple levels across hundreds of countries, you’re talking about thousands – that you’re bound to be pulled in more than one direction sometimes. Your hometown club. Your local XI. The big club you’ve always felt something for. Your dad’s team. The club you followed a favorite player to and stuck with. The exotic foreign club you started paying a little too much attention to. That one beautiful jersey you had to have (and couldn’t rightly wear without a little proper background knowledge). Your go-to club on FIFA for XBox.

It’s even more complicated for us American fans. Most of us grew up without local sides, those community-oriented clubs that get passed down through families around much of the world. Even once M.L.S. began, there continued to be an aura of franchise-y plastic wrap about American teams themselves, and though many of us have become fans, familial bonds weren’t common right out of the gate. American soccer fans have spent much of recent history looking, it seems, for something to latch on to.

What we State-side soccer fans have always lacked in authentic outlets, though, we’ve made up for in resourcefulness. We watched faraway games in strange languages on obscure cable TV channels and pirated internet feeds. We studied the complex histories and structures of the global game, learned the songs and the symbolism, and devoured soccer culture in almost every form, almost like it was takeout food. (“Hungry for Mexican?” “I just had that last week - let’s try this new German place I’ve been hearing about.”) We found connections - in our neighborhoods, our favorite players, our family histories. Along the way, we developed real bonds that stretched across the globe.

Meanwhile, M.L.S. has started to feel a little more authentic with every passing year - it’s become a viable outlet for passionate support and even love. And each World Cup that the U.S. participates in brings waves of new fans to the table, hoping to find something - anything - to give them that same amazing football feeling the Cup inevitably conjures. When that moment arises in every emerging fan’s life - the moment they realize they love soccer - most fans around the world know exactly where to direct that love. Americans, as we often are, are awkwardly spoiled for choice.

So it all ends up that there are a few clubs on every soccer fan’s radar. Personally? Well, I could name a handful in England alone. I’ve always had a soft spot for Newcastle, for instance - mostly due to Alan Shearer who seemed grittily relatable when I was learning to love the game. Arsenal, too - I find myself ever-so-slightly pulling for them when they’re on; rooting for them just feels so - what’s the word? - aerodynamic? I guess now that my Red Sox share ownership with Liverpool, I’m sort of invested in how they do (though I wouldn’t call myself anywhere near a supporter). Fulham also means something to American fans like me - though less now than it once did. I watch what German club FC Kaiserslautern is up to after visiting that town, and singing in their stadium, during the 2006 World Cup, and South African side Bidvest Wits after 2010. I already have a Brazillian team - Botafogo - who I obsess about a little bit (they’re just way too exotic and cool). I keep an eye on how my “local” club, the New England Revolution, are doing (though I don’t quite deem them worthy of passionate support just yet), and for family reasons, the Philadelphia Union, too.

These blips on my football radar ping at various strengths and frequencies throughout the year; they make following soccer fun. But I adhere to the golden rule. I have only one true soccer love. It’s the club I’ll pass down to my kids, and the pilgrimage I’ll make them take when they’re old enough. It’s the colors that make my blood boil, and the team I grind my teeth over. It’s Brighton & Hove Albion. If those others are blips, Brighton is a homing beacon.

I wasn’t much of a football fan yet when I arrived to live in Brighton as a student in the late 90s. (To be fair, they weren’t much of a football club at that point either.) By the time I’d left England, I was sure I loved the city of Brighton, I think I suspected I loved football, and I knew I’d always follow the Albion. I’ve been a supporter from afar in the years since, watching them move up and down (and up and down) the English pyramid. The club didn’t even play in the city when I lived there; their historic home had been bulldozed for a shopping center by then, and they were playing miles away at another team’s ground, buried several leagues and hundreds of clubs below the top. Today they’re the proud owners of the best new stadium in the country, steps from where I once lived and studied. And this season concludes, they’re poised to do something incredible: join the English Premier League.

It’s no sure thing, of course, but they’ve never been this close before. Brighton’s most recent top-flight history (and there isn’t an overwhelming amount of it) predates the Premier League by a decade. Today, the Albion sit fourth in the Championship table with just a few games left to play. They won’t win it (congrats to Cardiff), but they can, should, must! finish in the top six and compete for a promotion spot via the Championship’s playoff system. They would, in fact, face their arch-rivals Crystal Palace in those playoffs if things stay as they are today - and beating Palace en route to a Premiere League promotion would no doubt be considered an “I can die in peace” moment for many Albion fans.

I’m not waiting for all that to happen; I need to get this out into the world right now: I love Brighton. I have faith that they’ll be in the top flight soon - if not this year, than the next, or the next. The club plays beautiful, inspiring football - their charismatic Uruguayan manager makes sure that it doesn’t look too English - and more importantly they have a positive, heady aura that isn’t going away any time soon. Does it hurt that their historic blue and white uniforms, their stadium, the city, and the region are just as beautiful as the on-field product? Not in the slightest.

So as the season runs to its inevitable conclusion, I say this: if you’re like me, and you keep track of a few clubs at once, consider making Brighton & Hove Albion one of the blips on your radar. As they move ever-closer to the big time, you’ll appreciate it. And if you do, look out - they’re the kind of club that will grow on you. Here’s hoping that, when the promotion playoffs start in a few weeks, they’ll have a few matches to play down in good old Sussex by the Sea.

To celebrate Brighton, I’ve just added a new BTN t-shirt in my Town T series. In signature blue and white, it’s ready for the playoff push and, after that, who knows? If you’d like one, you can get it here.

Soccer Out of Context: the Minneapolis Millers

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:39:00 -0400

Ghosts & Grandfathers League Member #2: The Minneapolis Millers

Though I’ve never been, I have a very distinct impression of Minneapolis. (And no, it’s not just weather clichés and Fargo accents.) It’s something innate that comes across when I meet people from the area, or even when I’m watching a Minnesota-based game on TV and the cameraman pans across the hometown crowd. I always sense that Minneapolis is a contented, self-aware city. Unlike some metro areas I could name, its residents don’t seem to have much of an inferiority complex or spend much time wishing their city was bigger or more important. Minneapolites seem proud but not desperately so, without too much of a need to justify themselves to a national audience. They seem patient, modest, smart, cultured, friendly - and above all, happy.

Author’s note: This is part of a recurring series on the soccer design aesthetic applied in other contexts. When you’re done here, feel free to read the original series, on Major League Baseball teams.
The A.L. East
The N.L. Central
The A.L. West
The N.L. West
The A.L. Central
The N.L. East

Done with all 30 baseball identities? Soccer Out of Context continues with the Ghosts & Grandfathers League series.

If you love American soccer, check out The Gadsden, a shirt made for US Soccer fanatics, over at my brand new design shop, Clean Sheet.

For more, including how to purchase future design work from the author, follow @m_willis on Twitter or leave your email at the very bottom of this page. Thanks for reading!

And why wouldn’t they be? Sure, it can be cold, but beyond that Minneapolis is a pretty fascinating place. The city has a famously great cultural scene. It’s a “big 4” American sports city, and each of the four teams is beloved. Improbably, it’s poised to become a soccer hotbed with the new, saved-from-oblivion-too-many-times Minnesota United F.C., a lower-level team that enjoys passionate support, a better visual identity than most M.L.S. clubs, and has some honest-to-goodness American soccer history on its side.

Sporting history, in fact, is always just around the corner in Minneapolis: the Vikings’s N.F.L. membership predates the A.F.L. merger and the Super Bowl, and though the hockey Wild and basketball Timberwolves are expansion franchises, each replaced a legendary club that had moved away (the North Stars to Dallas; the Lakers to L.A.). And then, baseball, where the Minnesota Twins have arguably the most history of all. The Twins date back a century to their founding in Washington, D.C.; the club set up shop in 1961 toting 50 years of memories from the east coast. Twin Cities residents were primed to receive the franchise, of course; prior to their arrival, they had two of their own clubs with decades of proprietary baseball history. Minneapolis’ half of that history, the Minneapolis Millers, were formed in the 1890s, and were a continuous presence in the city from the mid–1920s until Major League Baseball arrived. During that era, the Millers were a staple of Minneapolis civic culture.

From time to time I ask myself: “Why do I do projects like these?” Consider: a few weeks ago, the Millers won our online balloting (by a single vote over the New York Highlanders) and the right to be featured as the next Soccer Out of Context club. I knew next to nothing about them. When they prevailed, I skimmed over some basics: ok, formed in 1894, part of Ban Johnson’s renegade Western League, then the American Association in the early 1900s and a spotty history until the 1930s, when Ted Williams, and later, Willie Mays passed through. Then it was time for some quick visual searching - yep, pretty ‘M’ logo, orange and charcoal, classic look, ooh, there was a hockey club by the same name too! Great. Then I put the Millers aside and moved on to a few other pressing items. At that point, I had what I’d consider a novice’s knowledge of the Millers’ identity. This week, it was time to dive in again. With a base of information established, it became even more interesting to dig, to follow tangents, and to learn about fascinating stuff. Here’s some of what I uncovered, and some of the threads that I followed:

• Yes, Ted Williams played for the Millers in the late 1930s, who were a Red Sox AA affiliate at the time. His first season with the team, in spring training, he met, worked with, and took advice from Rogers Hornsby that shaped his coming hitting career. (Ted made a career-long habit out of talking with previous eras’ hitting stars, even getting into an argument with Ty Cobb over whether one should hit “up” or “down” on the baseball.)

• Willie Mays played there too, in the early 1950s, after leaving the Negro Leagues on his way to the Majors. The Millers were a New York Giants farm club by then, and Mays only played a few dozen games with the team. He wore #28 in Minneapolis, not the #24 that would become synonymous with his legend. The day he was called up to the big club, Willie happened to be on a road trip in Iowa with the Millers, and was spending a few off hours at a movie. The Giants found the theater and asked the projectionist to stop the movie, bring up the house lights, and ask if Willie was there - and if he was, to get back to his hotel. Willie did so, and was debuting for the Giants against Philly the next night.

• Speaking of farm clubs, the Millers figure interestingly in how, exactly, the system of minor league affiliates works in American athletics. I’ve long been interested in how exactly American sports developed an intricate network of owned affiliate clubs, farm teams and feeder leagues, whereas most of the rest of the world’s sporting bodies are essentially systems to organize fully independent clubs (though some maintain relationships with one another, at various levels of formality). The geographic size of the American market, the organic east-to-west nature in which clubs spread out over time, and the unique pervasiveness of collegiate athletics have all played a role. But so too did one Branch Rickey: the man who decided it made a ton of sense for the St. Louis Cardinals, his team, to own and control the clubs that were feeding him players (instead of waiting for those then-independent clubs to sell their promising players to the highest bidder, which the Cardinals usually were not).

The 1920s were just beginning when Rickey had his revelation. By the middle of the decade, he had established a pipeline of feeder clubs under the Cardinals’ control at every minor league level; success and championships followed. Nobody else was doing it - until, as the Cardinals hoisted trophies throughout the 30s and 40s - the advantages became far too obvious to ignore. Soon, almost every major league club was on its way to owning minor league franchises; those that didn’t, like the Washington Senators, had trouble keeping up and flailed in the standings. Rickey had pulled off, essentially, the first Moneyball move - just as disruptive, and more successful on the field - by changing the independent club paradigm in American sports.

How does this apply to the Millers? Well, after leaving the Cardinals in the early 1940s, Branch Rickey was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers to build a farm team in the image of his work in St. Louis. (He was also involved in a bit more history while there.) The Dodgers’ system included the purchase and control of the St. Paul (Minnesota) Saints - a AAA club and the great Twin Cities rival of the Minneapolis Millers. When the Dodgers affiliated with the Saints, the New York Giants - the Dodgers’ fierce major league adversary - decided it made sense to keep the two clubs’ rivalry alive at the minor-league level. The Giants, then, established control over the Millers, ensuring that the two teams’ players would be exposed to the Dodgers-Giants rivalry by proxy. Millers-Saints rivalry games had always been some of the best-attended, best-loved minor-league ballgames in the country; the addition of the Giants-Dodgers subtext only heightened matters. For a time, the Millers weren’t just a minor league diversion for Minneapolis residents - they were a vital and loved part of local life.

The ripples from Branch Rickey’s work that enlivened the Millers reverberated in strange ways, though. As mentioned, the Washington Senators were one of the last clubs to understand and apply Rickey’s minor-league franchise model, and they suffered for it on the field. One could argue, in fact, that the Senators’ failure to understand the minor league affiliate model contributed greatly to their incompetence and general poor form, which set the stage for their departure from Washington, D.C. and their arrival in Minnesota. The Twins brought major league ball to the region, and united fans under one banner - but they also finally ended the wonderful, rivalrous minor league era in Minneapolis sports history.

(I won’t go into the strange threads I followed that led to English football side Preston North End and their farm-club like relationship with the wonderfully named Holker Old Boys of Lancashire, or the exploration of the Harlem, New York, Rens, a 1950s “black five” basketball barnstorming club managed by the first man to greet Willie Mays in New York. Well - a bit more on the latter in a bit.)

So, that’s today’s long tangent, and, in a nutshell, why I love these projects. Each of these little exercises fits a few pieces of the puzzle together for an inquisitive sports fan; there really is some amazing information out there to be found if you just give yourself a good excuse to go looking.

So: Let’s get to the Millers’ out-of-context jersey.

The Design

click to enlarge

We’ll start with the logo. The Millers had a variety of fancy ‘M’ logos during their time; there were a few consistencies that I’ve paid homage to here. First, the M always demonstrated some kind of Tuscan flourish - the serifs and mid-strokes were usually flared in that common turn-of-the-centurey sporting style. I’ve picked a version of the M that was used in later years here. Second, the mark was always orange (and indeed, I’ve used orange on this jersey as both a primary color and a punchy accent). So the crest spot, over the heart, goes to the Millers’ club insignia, the orange, tuscan M.

Two design attributes interact with the M crest. First, a balanced black and orange stripe crosses the jersey behind the crest; this pays tribute to the solid black (with orange trim) the team used on its caps and numerals. (There were periods where the Millers introduced blue and red as well, but orange and charcoal-black dominate the visual history). It’s also a unique, but obviously soccer-friendly design - part sash, part horizontal stripe, the 65º angle gives the kit some extra personality and vibrance. Also, below the M crest, you’ll find nine small features - these are miniature indicators marking the Millers’ nine American Association titles - and two Junior World Series victories - between 1902 and 1960. The pennants are blue and triangular, signifying both traditional baseball pennants, and the flag of Minneapolis (itself a blue pennant) in their shape and form. The two orange stars show the years (1955 and 1958) in which the Millers captured both the American Association pennant, and victory in the Junior World series over International League competition.

Below the crest and stripe, one of the coolest aspects to this jersey: the sponsor.I’m still finding my way with regards to sponsors and manufacturers for these Ghosts and Grandfathers League teams; there is no manufacturer noted here, as the Millers existed before the concept of branded jerseys was really established. But in this case I think the sponsor fits perfectly - and if you’re familiar with Minneapolis, you won’t wonder for a second why it’s been chosen.

Grain Belt beer is a local brew, which for decades was made in Minneapolis proper and served around the midwest (but rarely elsewhere). I’ve actually never had a sip, but I’d like to. The Grain Belt company began operating before Prohibition and continued brewing in Minneapolis until the 1970s; today the brand is kept alive by a local brewing conglomerate and is - in the spirit of Pabst Blue Ribbon and, around my New England locale, Narragansett - experiencing a bit of a resurgence in certain fashionable circles. More importantly, the Grain Belt sign - on Nicollet Island in the Mississippi, right in the heart of Minneapolis - is a local landmark. (Again, to use local New England terminology, this is the Minneapolis version of the Citgo sign). I’m sure many a Millers fan quaffed a Grain Belt at Nicollet Park (this Nicollet guy got around, huh?) in the 40s and 50s - and many still do at local events. And the jump from “Millers” to grain to beer isn’t a tough one to make. It all seems to fit; I only regret that I couldn’t fit the awesome bottlecap behind the logo onto the jersey without overcrowding the design.

Finally, the shirt’s base color. I went here with what I’ll call an “off-white heather”. It’s vintage, but also streaked with fine heathered stripes to show a rough-hewn knit style. One might even see a connection to milled wheat in the organic, natural look. I’ve also included a very subtle “diamond” pattern that references and echoes the Grain Belt logo across the jersey. The overall effect is kind of a very dim argyle that gives the jersey some down-home personality without intruding too much. The Grain Belt diamond, with edges angled at 65º, sets the tone; it aligns perfectly with the chest stripe and the diamond patterns across the jersey. Around back, we keep it fairly simple. No name, Willie’s #28 in black with orange trim, and a recurrence of the diamond pattern.

From the colors to the history to the sponsor, this is a Minneapolis jersey through and through. I hope you’ll welcome the Minneapolis Millers into the Ghosts & Grandfathers League as founding member #2!

Balloting

Let’s take a second to look back at G.&G. ballot no. 2, and ahead to ballot no. 3. As in previous rounds, we started with 12 teams; the Millers took the top spot in a tightly contested race. At the other end, facing relegation (i.e., elimination from future ballots) were bottom-feeders Boston Bees (sorry guys, I even gave you a second chance!), Washington Senators, New Orleans Pelicans (the baseball club), St. Louis Perfectos, and Hollywood Stars. Four of those teams will fall off the ballot; I’m choosing to exercise my divine right and give one team a one-time reprieve - and that team will be the Hollywood Stars, who I think could make for a very cool soccer-style jersey. The Stars will stay for at least one more ballot; the others are gone, and we wish them well. Here’s how ballot no. 2 shook out:

 %v  Team
---- inducted
  21 Minneapolis Millers

---- roll over to next ballot
  20 New York Highlanders
  17 Seattle Pilots
   8 Cleveland Spiders
   8 Houston Colt .45s
   7 St. Louis Browns
   5 Homestead Grays

---- relegated  
   4 Boston Bees  
   4 Washington Senators
   3 New Orleans Pelicans
   3 St. Louis Perfectos

---- 1-time save via divine intervention
   0 Hollywood Stars

Replacing the five departing identities are five new ones - and these newcomers make for an amazing crop of identities. We’re stretching here, incorporating new sports and new locales - there’s so much to work with, how could you not? Welcome to the ballot: 1920s New York basketball team Harlem Renaissance (told you the Rens would be heard from again!), famous mid-century baseball barnstormers House of David, turn-of-the-century Pittsburg area gridiron football club Latrobe Athletic Association, and my favorite, from the 1950s heyday of Spanish baseball, Pops CB of Lloret de Mar, Catalonia, Spain. These new teams are pulled from my research and your write-in suggestions - which I’m happy to keep receiving. (Just find me on Twitter or via email with your Soccer Out of Context G.&G. League club idea. ) Here’s how the ballot looks now; you can brush up on the identities (if you like) using these links to Wikipedia, then let democracy prevail, by voting at the link below.

Harlem (NY) Rens House of David Seattle Pilots Pops Club de Béisbol (Spain) Cleveland Spiders Latrobe Athletic Association St. Louis Browns Houston Colt .45s Hartford Whalers Hollywood Stars Homestead Grays New York Highlanders

⇢ CLICK HERE TO VOTE ⇠

The first ballot was a landslide; the second a one-vote squeaker. And again, I have no idea what to expect in the race for G.&G. League team #3. Keep the votes and the suggestions coming, and we’ll call it in about a week.

Get a T-Shirt

If you enjoyed this piece, and/or the entire Soccer Out of Context series, you can always show your support (and your great taste) by grabbing a S.O.O.C. Ghosts & Grandfathers League t-shirt. Two designs to choose from, good-looking, high-quality and only $23 apiece.

Click here for the G.&G. “typographic” shirt (white on black), or click here for the “logo” shirt (black on heather grey).

And with that: see you back State-side next week for a new S.O.O.C. design.

If you made it this far, you might enjoy a few other uniform, soccer and identity-related projects I’ve worked on: Clean Sheet, my shop for soccer-inspired design; and design pieces Re-booting the New England Revolution and What Makes a USA Soccer Kit?. I’m also tracking seasonal soccer tables, beautifully, at the Seasons project. If you like tech writing, I do a little of that too now and then. Thanks again!

Friday Music

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:29:00 -0400

“Song for Zula” by Phosphorescent. The first thing I heard after the strings (and I was on board as soon as I heard the strings) was wizened Springsteen. There were more comparisons to come - Jeff Tweedy popped his head in; Willie Nelson rubbed his eyes in the corner - but the first one carried my initial impression. We’ve heard this chord progression before, but you could say the same of any blues song, right? Call this indie-pop blues, shuffling down a melancholy path we know pretty well.

Clean Sheet is my new apparel design shop. If you enjoyed the...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:14:18 -0400

Clean Sheet is my new apparel design shop. If you enjoyed the design style in Soccer Out of Context, you might like our work. Our first shirt is The Gadsden, for U.S. Soccer fanatics.

If you follow the team, you know that big games are coming up in June. This is the shirt you want to be wearing.

It’s available now, over at Clean Sheet. Click here: » cleansheet.co

Clean Sheet & The Gadsden

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:39:00 -0400

This is what we live for. Watching our guys walk out of the tunnel and onto the field at Estadio Azteca - the toughest 105-by–68-meter patch of soccer territory to conquer in North America - with everything at stake. Absorbing the vibration surging off the capacity crowd. Drawing in deep breaths as the anthems are played. Fighting through waves of emotion as the match bends back and forth. Screaming together, singing together, rooting together. Living and dying with our team.

Tomorrow, the U.S. takes on Mexico in Mexico City, in the most challenging North American match the Yanks can play. It only happens once every four years. They won’t control the atmosphere, the weather, the officials, their opponents’ talents or strategies, nor the few lucky bounces that will certainly pop up during the game. All the U.S. can control is all we’re asking of them: the level of their effort. We just want our guys to leave everything on the field. I happen to think we’re going to get a performance to be proud of. And I’m going out of my mind waiting for the whole thing to start.

We fanatics live for this stuff. Today, on the eve of U.S. vs. Mexico, I’m excited to reveal a new project made exactly for us, in moments exactly like this one.

Clean Sheet makes shirts and apparel designed for fanatics, inspired by the color, the iconography, and vibrant visual language of soccer (and other beautiful sports). It’s the feeling of game day, the buzz inside the stadium (or the pub, or the living room) during the biggest moments your club or country can have. It’s an expression of the way big matches make us feel.

Clean Sheet is starting modestly, with just one design. It’s built for U.S. fans, and it’s ready to order today.

The Gadsden.

If you’ve been to U.S. Men’s National Team matches, you’ve seen the flag. The coiled snake ready to strike if provoked. The stark “Don’t Tread On Me” motto. The clear, unmistakable warning expressed by the bright yellow and deep black colors. The Gadsden flag is more than a symbol to U.S. Soccer fans: it’s a rallying cry.

This is Clean Sheet’s first shirt.

click here to see & order The Gadsden.

U.S. fans know this feeling. It’s the urgency when only three points will do; it’s the feeling of being an underdog, and further, being dismissed by the footballing world. It’s the will to defend, attack, and succeed because of something innately American. It’s red, white and blue, plus just that little bit extra. Clean Sheet is making The Gadsden in April so U.S. fans will have it in time for crucial home World Cup qualifiers throughout the summer and fall.

Including, you know, a little match with Mexico. The one we’ll play later this year, this time on U.S. turf. The one that’s turned into a battle of the elements - La Guerra Fria, they call it - traditionally played in the most raucous home-field atmosphere the U.S. can provide: a cold, inhospitible Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio (home, by the way, of the yellow and black). So if you’d like a Gadsden, please be sure to order by mid-April to make sure you’re included in the first - and possibly only? - batch of shirts.

This is the start; more Clean Sheet shirts are on the way. As the World Cup draws closer, Clean Sheet will be celebrating soccer’s beautiful visual langue with a series of shirts on national identities - and you’re invited help choose how we go about it. And we’re excited to meet soccer fans’ high standards by producing some pretty lovely, fun-to-wear, future-all-time-favorite shirts.

But first things first. You’re welcome to have a look around the new site - at cleansheet.co - and give us feedback on Twitter or Facebook.This is a very exciting project for me to introduce and to work on, and if you have any questions or feedback, just let me know. You’ll have my full attention - except, of course, for about three hours tomorrow night.

Boston from the Longfellow tonight.

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:04:00 -0400

Boston from the Longfellow tonight.

Through a Glass, Inevitably

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:39:00 -0400

I’ve been reading much handwringing about what a product like Google Glass means for polite society. Because the item in question is a powerful computer shaped like eyeglasses, Glass can become an omnipresent documentarian of its wearer’s life - analyzing, recording and even live-streaming the events and faces that surround it - without giving much notice that it’s doing so. Among prominent writers who opine about technology, this is not going over well.

Obviously we need to be in the situation to truly assess it, but I’m not sure I want to talk to people who are wearing Google Glass, ever. Our culture is already soundbite-y and out-of-context enough.
— David Chartier

My hope is that restaurants and bars will ban them.
— John Gruber

The device’s eyeglass form factor alters something fundamental about our unspoken bargain with powerful technology - it removes the social cues that currently signal to other humans: hey, you’re about to be recorded, scanned, broadcast, and/or saved for posterity. Or even, hey: you’re about to be ignored while I look something up on my phone. There are observable, expected behaviors that surround the modern use of cameras and smartphones, and usually (but not always) those behaviors give others fair warning when devices are being actively brandished. Glass changes that; there’s no telling when someone who’s wearing them is actively using them, not even as they’re looking you in the eye. Sure there’s a “red light” when they’re recording, but a “turn off the red light” app (or a tiny piece of tape) isn’t hard to conjure. Glass introduces the tangible threat that something surreptitious could be happening to you at any time. It’s spooky, no doubt about it.

So as high-profile observers weigh in - this is tech-pundit red meat, after all - a passionate response pours forth. This is only encouraged by very justifiable suspicions surrounding Google’s motives. The verdict is clear: Public places should ban Glass (some have already, chiefly as publicity stunts). Their use in “cool” places should immediately render those places uncool. And hey, if people wearing Glass glasses get punched in the face, well, what did they expect?

It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.
— Mark Hurst

There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.
— David Yee

All this stuff rings true; I will feel vaguely uncomfortable if I see somebody wearing Glass near me. I will take steps, to an extent, to avoid being in the observable path of a Glass user. I think it’s right to be incredibly skeptical about a company that makes its living indexing information about us and selling it to advertisers, when they introduce a product that could record, potentially, everything about everybody and save it forever. This sentiment isn’t hard to get behind; you won’t find a reaction approaching this level of consensus on most topics that concern the tech world.

But there’s something being lost in the back-slapping backlash: no matter how much we find it distasteful, Glass is inevitable technology. Moore’s Law ensures that. Sure, we can gather up arms, ban people wearing techy-looking frames from public places, withhold public acceptance, and scorn those who deem the technology worthy or cool. But it won’t matter, because technological progress is improving too rapidly to stop something like Glass now. It won’t matter because when Glass is good enough, it won’t be identifiable anymore. It won’t, in fact, be visible. And because of that, it will be everywhere.

A quick analogy is in order. Forget the oft-stated factoid that the iPhone has more processing power than the computers NASA used to get us to the moon. Simply compare today’s iPhone 5 with the original 2007 iPhone. The 5 is far more powerful, has a far better battery, has a far better camera, has far better networking capability, has a far better screen, is made out of higher-quality materials and yet is far thinner and far lighter. Oh, and it’s about half the price of the ’07 model. Five and a half years of progress have yielded, what, a phone that’s five-fold better than its first version? Ten-fold? It’s somewhere in that range, right?

This is what will happen with wearable computers like Glass. Every few months, a new model will arrive that’s smaller, lighter, less goofy-looking, less noticeable. Manufacturers will fight to offer versions that improve on the competition, and the pace of development will be staggering. Eventually Glass (or a Glass competitor) will be something that fits into regular eyeglass frames, then maybe something like a frameless monocle. Then, a contact lens. Then, a little bit down the line, it’ll be an implant - something you can get electively for a few hundred bucks - maybe you check a box when you go in for Lasik, and get Glass thrown in there too.

Over time, Glass will get markedly better, just like the iPhone has. Today’s Google Glass is, in fact, 2007’s iPhone. (In fact, since Google is admittedly releasing this product early, it might be more akin to a 2005 or 2006 iPhone prototype.) So what will a five- or ten-fold improvement on Glass look like? Probably nothing at all. Because as part of getting better, Glass will disappear.

In a few years - and I’m talking a decade out, two at most - it won’t matter how outraged we’d be if we saw somebody wearing Glass in public. It won’t make a difference that we’d punch them in the face if we saw them recording us. We won’t know who has Glass. We won’t know when somebody’s recording, or looking something up. The march of technology ensures that Glass’s biggest weakness as a product - how goofy the frames look - will melt away into nothing. As it does, the possibilities that a product like Glass opens up will become more and more enticing to many who no longer fear public stigma.

Eventually, when it becomes physically imperceptible to do so, the majority of us will probably be using something like Glass. By then, of course, the fact that we ever needed eyeglass frames to enable the technology will be laughable; the whole system will be so small and so integrated it will be functionally invisible. Privacy issues will be rocky, but an addiction to the power of the technology will override all else, and a steady redefinition of the concept of personal privacy will cascade down through the coming generations. We’ll also most likely have established a rudimentary gestural etiquette around the use of invisible technology. Roger Ebert, of course, predicted this many years ago.

Taking in that video, today, is a bit incredible; first, because watching an intelligent person spoon-feed Bill O’Reilly will never go out of style. But more importantly, consider the timeline: if the day the interview takes place is point A, and the future Ebert’s describing is point C, we’re already more than halfway there - well past point B. That means that parts of what Ebert says sound silly-easy (“of course we can do that!”) and parts sound silly-impossible (“how could we do that?”). But remember, it was all fantasy when Ebert said it. Now, with advances in natural language processing, high-speed persistent connections and ever-shrinking chip dies, It’s coming true, little bits at a time. Like one of those fast-motion videos of flowers blooming, this video clip translates something normally out of phase with human appreciation - technological progress - onto a scale we can understand.

Roger Ebert

Though it may be inevitable, technological progress isn’t inherently moral. Our zeal to connect pipes and wires and data streams together is usually more powerful than our urge to preserve our naked humanity. There are virtually no checks on our society’s technological enthusiasm, especially when that enthusiasm is stoked by the equally powerful and equally human desire to make lots of money. This is the road we’re on right now - this is the human experiment we’ve designed for ourselves. (And anyway, progressive societies tend to adjust the definition of what is “morally acceptable” to fit what current technology enables us to do - not the other way around.)

So, however well-considered the the backlash over Google Glass - however real the concerns, or clever the rejoinders - it seems a little misguided to single out this one project for derision unless we’re talking about getting off the entire nutty ride. Yes, Glass presents a host of challenges to what we currently think of as humane society. But we’ve already set up the rules of the game: innovate, iterate, integrate. Those rules guide our progress now. Glass isn’t just this one goofy product, it’s the first embodiment of an idea: the idea of frictionless, imperceptible, networked personal supercomputing.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov

These concepts scare us, as humans, and and we react in a very human way: with bluster and critique. But even reasoned concern misses the broader truth, and derisive snark masks it; both styles of response can make it seem like Glass could never catch on. To the contrary: short of legislation, Glass (or something like it) is happening, and quickly. Progress is happening. So it’s time to either a) start punching everybody who blinks a little too much, b) pick up a few Wyoming real estate brochures, or c) start figuring out how to adjust to (yet another) brave new world.

React on

Moore’s Law as the ref, @gruber as the skeptic, @ebertchicago as the visionary: The inevitable arc of Google Glass. mwl.li/glass-inevitab…

March 12, 2013

Soccer Out of Context: the Montreal Expos

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:39:00 -0400

Ghosts & Grandfathers League Member #1: The Montreal Expos

Bonjour! Bienvenue à Montréal! Puis-je vous offrir un peu de fromage et un air renfrogné? Oui?

As soon as you pass over the border into Quebec, the whole landscape changes. Far-upstate New York is, well, scuffed up a little bit - full of stuff that’s either rusty, or made out of plastic (so, just dirty). The gas station names become a little weirder as you move north - you’ll eventually start to question how many “x”’s should actually be in “Exxon” - but if you’ve cruised any basic rock salt & strip mall American landscape in your life, you’ll have the general picture. Just gas up, buy some homemade jerky and get back on the highway before anybody notices your shirt has a collar and starts asking questions.

And then, the border crossing. Assuming this presents no problems for you - and if you can’t cross into Canada, maybe an upstate New York border town is the right place for you to settle down - you emerge in a completely different world. Your latitude hasn’t changed. You’re still under the same sky (but how would you know, given the 130% chance that it’s overcast). But the feeling of being “somewhere else” is tangible. Three thoughts cross your mind pretty quickly.

What are km, and why are we hundreds of them from anything?
Um, I don’t have any rights n’ stuff here, do I?
… whoa, everything is pretty.

Eastern Canada seems to care about their land. They have farms. Northern New York has farms too, but a few too many of them look like Walmarts without signage. Canada has farms with, you know, barns and horses. There’s far less litter along the highway. The road signs use kilometers and French, reinforcing that “c’est notre maison” feeling. From the border, you have about 45 minutes of driving-plus-acclimation time, just enough as it turns out. Because once you see the city, you don’t care what the landscape looks like or which verb conjugations you remember from ninth grade. You’re ready to dive in.

Author’s note: This is part of a recurring series on the soccer design aesthetic applied in other contexts. When you’re done here, feel free to read on.
The A.L. East
The N.L. Central
The A.L. West
The N.L. West
The A.L. Central
The N.L. East

Done with all 30 baseball identities? Soccer Out of Context continues with the Ghosts & Grandfathers League series.

If you love American soccer, check out The Gadsden, a shirt made for US Soccer fanatics, over at my brand new design shop, Clean Sheet.

For more, including how to purchase future design work from the author, follow @m_willis on Twitter or leave your email at the very bottom of this page. Thanks for reading!

Montreal is full of promise - the reason you’re making the trip is likely for entertainment - and soon your only concern will be how much you’re losing on the U.S. dollars-to-Canadian dollars-to-casino chips exchange rate. Or something like that. Coming from the northeastern U.S., there’s a high likelihood that you’ll be partaking in one of the city’s many spectator sports (ahem), and it used to be you could count Major League Baseball on that list. Time was, a well-rounded trip to Montreal would include - ideally somewhere in the middle - a trip to Stade Olympique to watch a midling team play on a luminous green field in front of thousands of empty seats and, eventually, several empty cups of Molson. The promise of late 1960s baseball - bright, space-age, and metric - stayed alive in Montreal for years after that decade ended. You can no longer count baseball on the list of Montreal’s many entertainments; for a time, though, the Expos made the trip to Canada worth it almost all by themselves.

The Design

click to enlarge

The Montreal Expos debuted in 1969, amongst the last few documented cases of World’s Exposition fever ever recorded. (A vaccine was developed soon after, and is now stored inside the Epcot Center’s geodesic sphere.) Baseball history in Montreal went back decades before that, of course - Jackie Robinson famously joined the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club at the time, where a relatively enlightened public helped support his transition to playing with an integrated club. There was a nice downtown ballpark, Delorimier Stadium, and the Royals had an absolutely stunning white-and-blue visual identity. When baseball finally placed a major league team in the city, the Royals had been gone for almost 20 years, and visual attitudes had evolved towards 1970s excess. As such, a new identity was never likely to feel “classic” - especially not with a name like “Expos”. Instead of a historic and reverent baseball identity, the first international, cosmopolitain, continental baseball club was born. The Expos le Baseball - (so I really was seeing “ELB” on the hat as a kid! Update: No I wasn’t. As Chris Creamer from the invaluable Sportslogos.net points out, it was actually intended to be “eMb”, for “Expos de Montréal Baseball” - and with that info, the 8-year old kid in me loses just a little bit more innocence.) were ostentatious in some ways (just look at the tri-color cap) and surprisingly reserved in others (look at the clean, staid debut uniforms). The club started out at a traditional outdoor stadium, Jarry Park, and then quickly moved into what was intended to be a wonder of its time - the 1976 Olympic Stadium, replete with turf and a game attempt at a retractable roof. In the moment, it all seemed to work; for the first time, a small slice of America’s national pastime tasted more like tarte de pommes than apple pie.

During the latter stages of their existence, attendance and passion waned; the “highlight” of the Expos’ later years came in 1994 when they were running away with the N.L. East and looked like a World Series favorite, only to find their season ended in Sopranos finale-esque fashion when the players’ strike hit. A few years later, they would do much to develop, and then trade away, Pedro Martinez (thanks!); soon after that, they were being run by the Commissioner’s office and playing half of their games in Puerto Rico. And then the Expos were gone, the bones of their team becoming what’s now known as the Washington Nationals, and their spirit floating off into the revelry of a Crescent Street evening.

The Expos’ contribution to baseball culture is surprisingly immense. They were the first international M.L.B. club, predating the Toronto Blue Jays by almost a decade; they were also the first club to show many Americans what baseball sounded like in another language. They fused tradition with a progressive attitude that recalled the world-minded influences on our society at the time of their creation - the push for the metric system, hype around Olympiads and Worlds’ Fairs, and a sense - expressed in design - of a whimsical, almost naive futurism (see: the logo, those caps, or the architecture and intended function of Olympic Stadium). The Expos’ place in baseball deserves to be honored - one could even argue convincingly that the club has the best dormant brand in major-league baseball history.

For the Expos project, the first Ghosts & Grandfathers League design, I had to make a few choices beyond those I’ve encountered while designing previous (living) identities. For instance, what era of the club should be interpreted? Should it be a mix of the entire existence, or a specific moment in time? What to do about manufacturers, or sponsors - do I make them up? Leave them off? Or select historically appropriate fits?

I decided, in essence, to take each identity on a case-by-case basis. The Expos were around during an era in which sponsors and manufacturers were conceivable, so I’ve given them one of each - but a different approach might be necessary with, say, the nineteenth-century era Brooklyn Bridegrooms. I also decided to honor what I consider to be several of the clubs’ most distinctive visual tendencies over the course of their entire history - so this isn’t the 1994 Expos, or the 1969 club. It’s an amalgam.

Let’s start with the jersey color. It’s a light blue - a medium light, or “deep” powder blue, if there is such a thing - to recognize the Expos’ most distinctive jersey - their light blue “away” look that worked perfectly with their red, white and royal blue color scheme. If the Expos were still around today and hadn’t reverted to this color on the road by now, something would be amiss. The light blue carries a few textural flourishes - first, there is a very subtle, fine-grained “grid” pattern woven into the fabric that gets darker and more pronounced near the edges of the shirt. This is both a nod to “retro-futuristic” design, which suits the team’s identity, and a practical touch: the darkening pattern unites and blend the two blue hues, powder and royal, by creating a very subdued transition between light and dark on the jersey’s surface. You’ll also find, in the very lightest blue, a curling, tonal design that unfolds and crosses jersey horizontally and vertically. This feature is a modern graphic mark created to represent the Ville de Montreal, a cloverleaf shape that introduces both M’s and V’s and that was popular for a time in the 1980s, during the heart of the Expos’ run. Placed on the jersey, the Ville mark lends it a somewhat regal feel.

The famous tricolor M (or ~~ELB~~ EMB) logo sits over the heart as a crest; the ‘E’ portion is the only place on the jersey where bright red appears, giving it a little extra punch. A bit of the crest’s raised, embroidered effect is visible here as lined, horizontal stitching. The manufacturer is French brand Le Coq Sportif; I couldn’t resist the chance to use a Gallic brand in French-speaking Montreal. The sponsor is the common Quebec pharmacy chain Uniprix, who used a version of the logo I’ve depicted (an encircled, tilted U shape) for much of the Expos’ existence. Uniprix also ties in nicely with Expos’ history - they’ve purchased the right to put their name on Montreal’s popular international tennis center, which is built from remnants of Jarry Park, the Expos’ first home. The sponsor mark is treated subtly, almost as part of the shirt’s pattern rather than as an independent element, which helps to weave the logo more seamlessly into the jersey’s visual identity, and to work with - not against - the flow of the design. (As comfortable as we’re getting with the idea of jersey sponsorships, even in America, during this series of designs they will be subdued - if present at all - to underscore the more traditional nature of the eras that are represented.)

The shirt’s collar, side panels, and bottom edge are royal blue, off-setting the lighter tone and balancing out the colors. This trim carries around back, where (besides the M.L.B. logo) I’ve placed a player number, set in an appropriately demonstrative serif face and rendered in royal blue. I am going to forgo a name here (if only because it didn’t seem to fit with the expansive idea of the Ghosts and Grandfathers project), but #30 is a nod to one of the best Expos ever to swipe a base or beat out an infield hit. A final touch: the lowercase “expos” wordmark, so distinctive of the clubs’ design language, is centered at the shirt’s tail, where it accomplishes some branding while looking good, too.

I miss the Expos; they were an adventure, and their presence had a spirit (even when apathy took over) that baseball misses. (I also feel that if they’d been allowed to stick around and, say, moved into the A.L. East, they’d be prospering, but that’s a different article.) Here’s hoping french-speaking, poutine-eating, meter-home-run-distance-measuring baseball returns again one day - because as familiar as baseball makes us feel, it’s good to wonder where you are some times.

Ballot No. 2

It’s that time again. The Montreal Expos won the first ballot; who’ll be the next to join the league? I promised some ballot turnover based on performance and feedback from you, and it has arrived. Of the 12 initial identities on the ballot, five won’t be returning - the Expos won, of course, so they’re off, freeing up a slot - and the lowest vote-getters - the Chicago Orphans, Indianapolis Clowns, Louisville Colonels and Troy Trojans - are also falling off the ballot. (The Boston Bees actually fell into the “relegation zone” as well, but seeing as I’m running this thing, I live in Boston and I really want to do something for them one day, I gave them a one-time pass.) Here’s how the final table looked:

 %v  Team
---- inducted
46.1 Montreal Expos

---- roll over to next ballot
14.7 Seattle Pilots
 7.8 Houston Colt .45s
 7.4 Washington Senators
 5.8 St. Louis Browns
 5.0 New York Highlanders
 3.9 Cleveland Spiders

---- relegated
 2.7 Indianapolis Clowns
 2.3 Troy Trojans
 1.6 Louisville Colonels
 1.6 Chicago Orphans

---- 1-time save via divine intervention
 1.2 Boston Bees

Replacing the five departing identities are four new ones: the Minneapolis Millers, New Orleans Pelicans (the minor league baseball identity), St. Louis Perfectos, Hollywood Stars and Homestead Grays. These new teams are pulled from your write-in suggestions - which I’m happy to keep receiving. (Just find me on Twitter or via email with your Soccer Out of Context G.&G. League club idea. ) Here’s how the ballot looks now; you can brush up on the identities (if you like) using these links to Wikipedia, then let democracy prevail, by voting at the link below.

Minneapolis Millers New Orleans Pelicans St. Louis Perfectos Hollywood Stars Homestead Grays St. Louis Browns Houston Colt .45s Boston Bees Seattle Pilots Cleveland Spiders Washington Senators New York Highlanders

⇢ CLICK HERE TO VOTE ⇠

The Expos won the innaugural vote by quite a landslide; I have no idea what to expect in the race for G.&G. League team #2. Keep the votes and the suggestions coming, and we’ll call it in about a week.

Get The Look

Click here for the G.&G. “typographic” shirt (white on black), or click here for the “logo” shirt (black on heather grey).

And with that: see you back State-side next week for a new S.O.O.C. design.

If you made it this far, you might enjoy a few other uniform, soccer and identity-related pieces I’ve written: Re-booting the New England Revolution and What Makes a USA Soccer Kit?. I’m also tracking seasonal soccer tables, beautifully, at the Seasons project. If you like tech writing, I do a little of that too now and then. Thanks again!

Introducing: The Ghosts & Grandfathers League

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:39:00 -0500

The Socccer Out of Context project has, so far, seen all 30 Major League Baseball clubs get soccer-style jerseys. So what comes next? Allow me to quote from the very end of my final M.L.B. post, covering the National League East:

Every few weeks or so, as I can, I’d like to do a further S.O.O.C. design from a pool of historic identities. (I’ll start with baseball clubs, but this could go anywhere, really.) Some of these names will have prominent histories; some existed in brief flourishes and are not well-documented. Some are the ancestors of existing professional franchise (i.e., “grandfathers”); others became visual dead ends (or “ghosts”). But all present some really interesting visual opportunities.

So here, I’m announcing the next phase of Soccer Out of Context pieces - a fictional league beyond the American and National, if you will. In fact I’m christening it the Ghosts and Grandfathers League. And I want you to help me decide which clubs are featured.

(The quotes are out of order, but then, this whole TRIAL is out of order!)

A few hundred of you took me up on my invitation by voting in the first G.&G. League ballot, and I can’t wait to get started. But lest I get ahead of myself, before we do, I thought I’d introduce you to the new series, explain a little more about why I’m going in this direction, and provide some more detail about how this continuation of Soccer Out of Context will work.

First, let’s cover the “why” for anybody who missed it (and how could you have failed to make it to the end of a 6500-word screed about a kid running around Shea Stadium?). Once more, quoting from that article:

…a big part of the fun has been digging into the past to learn more about teams’ visuals and traditions. Again and again, I’d find and follow rabbit holes that led to some fantastically obscure baseball history. The chaotic color and convention sprinkled through baseball lore is unfathomably rich. I was able to reference a bit of that with this project, but there are so many defunct athletic identities out there, I didn’t want to pass up the chance to do some interesting Soccer Out of Context work with some legendary clubs that don’t live on in our present era.

To expand on this thought, briefly: like most fans, I’ve been to a handful of ballparks and a few Halls of Fame; I’ve seen my share of markers where famous home plates used to be, and Romanesque ruins of mostly-demolished outfield fences. I’ve been awed by 50-odd ounce hickory bats and wondered what it was like to play summer day games in wool. (Thanks to playing Little League baseball in the 80s, I’m well-versed in polyester.) I’ve considered, during scattered moments, what long-defunct teams must have meant to their regions and their fans. Some were beloved; others, probably, didn’t mean much, and were never appreciated in their time. Many encountered demographic decline, or changing economies, or shifting cultures. Some went on to bloom in different locales - well, some version of them did, anyway - but others simply laid down where they were. The more I learn about what a strange, twisted tapestry our sporting historical record makes - and I refer to all sports, not just baseball - the more I understand three things:

1) It’s fascinating to learn how we got here.

2) Creating modern interpretations of older identities honors them, and even brings them to back to life a small way.

3) There are hundreds of incredible old visual identities just sitting out there in history, waiting to be polished up and admired.

This is why I’d like to take Soccer Out of Context into the past (and not only the dusty, decades-old past; recent history is just as important). I want to celebrate how we’ve become the fans we are. I thought about continuing with other contemporary sports leagues; maybe in time I will. But to me, it’s much more interesting to dive into history, and with it, work with any sport in any era. There’s nothing baseball-exclusive about the Ghosts & Grandfathers League series; we’ll start there, but this project could evolve towards minor league hockey or A.B.A. basketball or college crew or, yes, even older soccer identities. Through the wonder of the balloting process, it will be up to you, the reader, to help me steer the ship.

And that’s exactly how we kicked things off last week. To inaugurate the G.&G. League, I assembled a ballot of twelve initial candidate identities drawn from baseball’s past. Teams ran the gamut from relatively modern (but defunct) teams (the Seattle Pilots and Houston Colt .45s) to ancient dead-ball era clubs (the New York Highlanders, Chicago Orphans and Troy Trojans). In the end, though, it didn’t matter who I ran out there; turns out only one winner was ever really possible:

If that ballot was a ballgame, a long reliever would have been in by the third inning. Total blowout. With an astounding 45+% of the popular vote (out of about 250 votes counted), the next Soccer Out of Context identity, and the charter member of the Ghosts & Grandfathers League is: the Montreal Expos. You guys have spoken; I’ll get to work, and the Expos piece should debut next week. Along with the new out-of-context jersey look, we’ll also discuss the the balloting process, your write-in votes (and there are some good ones), and more. I suspect this is going to be be fun.

One last thing

As I can’t stop mentioning, I’m having a blast doing design work around this project. The “Ghosts & Grandfathers” imagery, particularly, is pretty evocative and fun to think about, and I want to make some of it available to you. So I’ve put together a few simple t-shirt options for anybody who might be interested in the design language surrounding this project, and/or who wants to show support for this work. I don’t sell licensed team merchandise, advertising, or get paid to do any this stuff (though again, it is quite enjoyable), but by golly, I can sell you a t-shirt if you’d like. Two designs will be ready in the next few weeks, and both are available for pre-order today:

The G.&G. Logo T
(black on grey heather)
Click here to order

This shirt proudly displays the quirky little logo I’ve worked up for the project; a ghost and a grandfather sitting side by side, waiting patiently for history to take its course. I’m particularly proud of this logo design, because almost all the components come from the the Noun Project, one of the best resources out there for designers. It’s $23, comfortable as anything, and comes in black on grey heather in the usual variety of sizes. To read more or buy the G.&G. Logo t-shirt, click here.

The G.&G. Typographic T
(heritage white on black)
Click here to order

This shirt is just a bit more serious - it’s simply the G.&G. League wordmark on a soft, great-fitting t-shirt. It’s also $23, and comes in heritage white on black, for formal occasions or stain-prone individuals like myself. The usual sizes, of course, are available. To read more or buy the G.&G. Typographic t-shirt, click here.

A few quick details:

• I will be scaling the initial run of each shirt based on demand, so if you are interested in getting one of the first batch, order in the next few days! …Or just wait for the next run.

• As I mentioned, I’m especially proud to report the Noun Project, a wonderful resource for designers, played a big role in the sourcing of elements for the G.&G. League logo. I’d like to acknowledge the work of the following designers: Ilias Ismanalijev, Okan Benn, Nicolas Molès, and the Factorio.us Collective. All designers are contributors to the Project, and links to their work can be found there. I highly encourage anyone interested in visual design to check out the creative effort they, and countless others, have put into the Noun Project.

So to recap: The Ghosts & Grandfathers League is here. A few shirts are here. And based on your votes, I’ll be tackling an out-of-context design for the Montreal Expos next week. Drop by; we’ll have poutine and legal gambling for everybody. I’ll see if I can get Youppi! to show up (I hear he’s in a weird place these days). See you all then.

The entire Soccer Out of Context: Major League Baseball series...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:14:00 -0500

The entire Soccer Out of Context: Major League Baseball series is complete, and it was a joy to write, design and produce. Thanks to all for for reading. If you haven’t read any Soccer Out of Context work yet, then start here and make your way through. And though the majors are now finished, this project continues with the Soccer Out of Context: Ghosts & Grandfathers League series - where classic and forgotten athletic identities are revived with soccer-style aesthetics. You can vote on the first identity here.

Also, I’ve introduced Clean Sheet Co. - a brand new shop to buy original soccer-inspired t-shirts and apparel. We’re starting out slow - our first shirt is made for US Soccer fans, and it’s called The Gadsden - but we’ll be ramping up over the next couple months. Check it out if you like that sort of thing.

More fútbol-style inspiration coming soon.

Soccer Out of Context: the NL East

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:39:00 -0500

Well, we made it. This piece covers the last division I’ve yet to look at - the National League East - and it also marks a full trip around the country and around the Major League bases. As of today, all 30 M.L.B. clubs will have received their Soccer Out of Context re-imagining.

The series has been beyond fun for me to design, write and produce. I want to share a number with you guys, a number that could not be more impressive to me even if it was rendered in Red Sox-style numeral typeface. In fact, hold on – let me do just that.

As of today, that’s the number of unique visitors this site has hosted since December 13th, the day about ten weeks ago on which I published the first Soccer Out of Context piece. (And sorry; any time I use a Fenway wall motif I can’t resist throwing in a ‘No Pepper’ reference.)

This is not an insignificant number to me; growing up a Sox fan, before Monster Seats and Dugout Seats and Budweiser Super-Mega Pavilions, Fenway Park could seat just about a third that many people. In fact, at my first ballgame in ’86, the Park’s official day capacity was 33,583. (The closest thing then to a Budweiser Pavilion was the Moosehead sign out past the left field screen.) Since childhood, I’ve always used the visual of a full Fenway Park to think about numbers in the “many thousands” range. And here, in about 10 weeks, I’ve put something out into the world that’s filled up three Fenways. (Well, not exactly, but just let me have a moment here.) That’s a weekend series right there, and it’s a huge deal to 8-year-old me and current me alike. So, thank you. With help from a core of really interesting, cool fans, and some big-time exposure, I’ve been watching with pride as more and more folks have dropped by to view the designs.

It’s been a great trip. Thanks for reading, discussing, sharing and enjoying this work. It’s a pleasure making it for you, and I’m ever-grateful that you’re here. If this whole project was a home run, it was an inside-the-parker, because I’m out of breath.

Three quick programming notes before we start. First, I have fielded many requests to create and sell these designs. I am exploring licensing opportunities; it’s not the easiest thing for an independent designer to do, and this project has a bunch of complexities to it, but nevertheless there are a few promising avenues to investigate. If there’s any news on that front, I will be letting people know online, so make sure you’re signed up for email updates (at the very bottom of this page) and/or are following me on Twitter to get the latest. Second, if you like my design aesthetic and want to purchase and wear stuff that I make, I’ll have some news very soon for you about a new line of soccer-inspired items that you might enjoy. Again, to stay up to date, just find me online via email or Twitter. And finally, Soccer Out of Context isn’t quite done yet! Read on past today’s designs for your chance to help me define the next generation of S.O.O.C. work.

OK. On we go to the N.L. East.

Atlanta Braves

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For the majority of my baseball-watching life, the Braves have been the most professional club in the majors. The Yankees won more titles, and had more rules; other clubs were more dynamic and had greater peaks. But nobody did ruthless consistency like the Braves. The club won the N.L. East 14 consecutive times between 1991 and 2005. They made the N.L. Championship Series eight consecutive times between 1991 and ’99. (I had forgotten that fact - wow.) They averaged 97 wins during that stretch, and won 100 games 6 times (three in a row in ’97-’98-’99). They had the same manager for each one of those seasons. And for most of those years, they had Maddux / Glavine / Smoltz at the top of the rotation, scaring just about everybody who needed to beat them in a short series. (Of course, the Braves only won one World Series during that stretch, a topic for another piece.) And they had the same uniform during each of those seasons, too.

As an American League fan, I watched this dominance from afar; as a Boston fan, I was in an interesting position to do so. The Braves began life, of course, as the Boston Braves, and had a half-century of history in the city I (and the Red Sox) call home before moving on. And though the club left town decades before I arrived, you can still go down to Boston University’s Nickerson Field and see the echoes of where the Braves played until 1952; the old Braves Field grandstand has been retained and worked into what B.U. now uses for a general purpose athletics facility. The stand rises at a graduated angle that has oddly historic overtones, and if you squint you almost can see the Always Buy Chesterfield sign out in the bleachers, just in front of the swath cut by today’s Mass Pike. The Braves won one World Series in Boston, and another after they moved to west to Milwaukee; Hank Aaron bridged the club to Atlanta, where the they were primarily defined by being broadcast to a national audience via Ted Turner’s T.B.S. cable network (during an era when almost no Major League club had a truly national media profile.) And then came the dominance of the 1990s, and with the advent of interleague play, the Braves’ return to Boston as the Red Sox’ designated National League “rival” - a rivalry which generally involved the Braves showing up at Fenway for a weekend, winning two out of three games by scores of 2–0 or 3–1, and vanishing again.

The Braves’ grey road uniforms, then, have always seemed to me to be an emblem for the club. The Braves are invariably the “other” team. From a Bostonian’s perspective, they were second fiddle to the Sox, and then left on a road trip and never came back. From a national perspective, it’s been years of watching “insert flavor-of-the-year team” play the Braves for the National League pennant, or flipping past a Braves vs. somebody game on basic cable. The color and pageantry always seemed to be in the other dugout; the Braves were always just there, either grimly winning (during the season) or gamely losing (in the postseason). The club’s grey jerseys, set off by the thick navy and red piping they feature along the jersey placket, embodies this persona. The Braves’ home whites are classics as well, and also feature that same notable piping, but I can only speak for myself here when I say, for the reasons outlined above, I don’t actually think of the Braves wearing white that much. I think of them in their road greys first.

For their soccer look, I’ve given the Braves the grey of their visiting uniforms. The fabric treatment here carries with it some of the visual personality of wool for a vintage feel, paying recognition to the club’s 130 years of organized history. The deep placket piping that defines the modern jersey is given an homage with a decorative “piping” element that surrounds the collar, follows baseball-style contours around the front and down the chest to the jersey’s base. This effect gives the jersey something very distinctively “Braves” - and is a great combination of baseball and soccer visual traditions.

The logo, of course, is the club’s famous ‘A’ mark, and though there were other contenders, the A is iconic and brilliant when rendered in a plain context, as a soccer-style crest mark. Beneath the A are three stars - most prominently, a red star for the clubs’ most recent Atlanta-bases World Series victory in 1995. The two other stars, outlined in navy, celebrate the titles won in Milwaukee (appropriately, the star to the geographic northwest) and Boston (the star to the northeast). The Braves have won exactly one World Series in each city they’ve called home, a traditional quirk that I’m sure their fans would like to see rendered obsolete.

The jersey’s collar and sleeves are dark navy; the sleeves get red ends and the team’s equally iconic tomahawk insignia as a patch, which is both beautiful and appropriate in this context. The club is sponsored here by Delta Airlines, who make Atlanta a major air-travel hub, and the jersey is made by Champion Athletic, a North Carolina-based company well within the team’s regional rooting area. On the back, the player name and number are rendered in one-color navy as well, for a stark, crisp finish to the entire package.

This look honors the consistency and respect for tradition the Braves seem to bring to their identity. I hope that in a soccer context, this jersey would contribute to the club’s strong visual tradition and determined on-field style.

Miami Marlins

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Am I the only person alive that absolutely loves what the Marlins have done over past few seasons? Well, let me clarify - I mean from a visual and branding perspective; nobody supports the personnel moves the team’s been making under its current leadership. But from an identity standpoint, the Marlins have undergone, to me, one of the most successful rebranding efforts in years. I think what the club is doing is stylistically fantastic, and I hope that I can reflect that in a soccer context.

Let’s start, briefly, by discussing the old Florida Marlins identity. It was a 1990s from-scratch sports brand. It had teal. It had black. It had gaudy uniforms. It had a full name that didn’t roll off the tongue so much as it got caught somewhere back among one’s tonsils. And still, it wasn’t that bad an identity. On the field, the club ricochetted between winning World Series titles and getting blown apart to save money - a wild and ultimately nonsensical way to build fan loyalty in a somewhat distracted Miami market. After a successful lobbying effort, the team left their football-stadium timeshare, built a new, only-in-Miami stadium (it has aquarium walls!), brought in a ton of on-field talent, and rebranded the club.

The talent didn’t work out, and it’s basically gone. The rebrand - well, not everybody was a fan. But it’s sticking. And to that, I say: good. This is a solid, flexible, fun and worthy brand. In a baseball world of blackletter fonts and navy-and-red schemes, the Marlins are a coastal breeze, and a relief; this identity was by far my favorite to play around with during this project’s initial design phase. The colors go together; they say Miami and modern without being garish or cheap. They’re distinctive, too, without being overly flashy. Ditto the streamlined Marlin logo, and the updated Miami ‘M’ insignia. Paired with white or cream, the colors are laid-back Miami cool; paired with black, they pop like South Beach neon. You don’t have to like the Marlins on the field, but I urge you to give their new identity a fair shot. For the first time in a long time, a Major League team’s rebrand is slightly ahead of the curve, instead of slightly (or very) behind it.

Obviously I embraced the club’s new look in a soccer context. Let’s start with the logo, in full color, sitting in the traditional soccer crest position. To the right of the crest are two gold-yellow stars for the two wold titles the Marlins managed to win in between fire sales. The jersey is charcoal black, primarily; the sleeves, collar and entire back are fully dark. Only the center chest panel is a lighter white tone, allowing for some front-facing personality behind the crest, manufacturer mark (Li-Ning, the largest athletic brand in China, an emerging US presence, and a new partner of Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat) and sponsor (Royal Caribbean cruise lines, who are headquartered in Miami). That personality is expressed by the diagonal “V” style pinstripe marks that alternate, in muted club colors, down the front of the chest panel. These marks call back shapes contained in the ‘M’ crest, which seems itself made up of Vs. The pinstripes actually enclose very subtle shades, creating slightly striped tint variations in aqua blue, tropical orange and gold between them. Around the back, the “v” motif is repeated in faint markings on the flat black surface; the name and numeral pop in a non-traditional typeface (I changed up the Marlins’ current face to Futura, to better echo the M crest mark). The player name, in golden yellow, offsets the number in aqua, which gets a halo’d orange stroke to accentuate the modern style. The M.L.B. logo completes the look.

Beyond the current identity, this adaptation of the Marlins’ current color scheme recalls styles and patterns used by traditional Miami soccer culture, from the NASL’s Ft. Lauderdale Strikers to the defunct M.L.S. side Miami Fusion FC. It’s a fitting nod to a region that could, in time, be a soccer hotbed - and should, sooner than that, have a baseball team with an identity, and an on-field product, worth celebrating.

New York Mets

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I do have some history with the Mets, and it’s not just 1986-inflicted. My extended family hails from Connecticut, and I’ve spent some good time there. You’re never far from a Mets fan (or a Sbarro) in Connecticut. Though Yankees fans were are ostentatious, and the “technically New England” thing means Sox fans are around, I have my theories that that much of the state was and is populated by “deep cover” Mets fans - the kind that don’t show up on maps and surveys. (Or maybe I just want to believe.) Anyway, my aunt frequently got good corporate box seats in the bowl area of Shea, so a few times each year I was treated to a Mets/Cardinals or Mets/Braves game, and invariably had a blast. It wasn’t Fenway, that’s for sure. Just as quaint Boston isn’t cutthroat New York, compact Fenway park - which makes you feel like you’re in somebody’s family room - evoked a much different feeling than towering Shea Stadium. Everything was huge and wide open in Shea - soaring orange foul poles, big empty gaps bookending the mammoth scoreboard (I think half of the thing just said “BUD”), giant hamster ramps, and the symmetrical shell of an upper deck that encircled two-thirds of the stadium. And of course, every 11 minutes or so a passenger jet would attempt to land on the infield. A lyric little bandbox, Shea was not.

About the fifth or sixth inning, the kids on any Shea trip would get restless, and we’d beg to run around the stadium. The older and more annoying we became, the more this request was granted. I recall the first time I was allowed to venture into the stadium by myself - I went instantly to the right field upper-deck, and climbed to the edge seat in the very last row. I wanted to sit in the spot that had to be, by empirical childhood logic, the worst seat in the house. I was in for a surprise, though; from that vantage point, the game took on an other-worldly, echo-y quality, as if I was floating over the field and everything was happening underwater. It transformed a July night game between two .500 teams into something cinematic. And beyond that strange effect, from that perch, a whole other world opened up - Shea’s upper decks ended in steep cliff-like edges; all that was left beyond the fenced side of the decking was air, and then the rolling New York skyline. The skyline at night was intoxicating too - I didn’t know which part I was looking at, but it seemed to be an endless collage of towers and blinking and noise and hot wind, most impressively, suspension bridges everywhere, each lit up with rows of greenish-white lights.

Now: maybe I was an impressionable kid; maybe I was inhaling fumes from a nearby chop-shop; maybe somebody slipped something into the large souvenir cup full of Sprite I was carting around. I don’t know. But I do remember feeling mesmerized at Shea, and I do know that I was sad when the stadium met its end, even if there wasn’t much warmth or personality there. Being there was an introduction to the idea of the big city to me, in a lot of ways. (The only part of Shea Stadium I ever wanted to see destroyed was the strip of grass in short right field directly behind first base.) But Shea is a parking lot now, and probably for the best. The Mets have something much more like Fenway now - Citi Field feels like a room, too - and the club is set to build a trove of new memories there.

They have started on the right foot, sartorially - the Mets have finally lost their mid–90s design tendencies, which deferred to trendiness and incorporated an ugly black into their perfectly pure color scheme. Now, it’s back to the basics: white or cream, Dodger blue and Giants orange, maybe a few pinstripes, and that’s it. This is the palette that honored New York’s baseball history, the city itself, and ingratiated the team to the public when it debuted in the early 1960s, after the cruel departure of its predecessors to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The return to traditional colors happens just in time to lend this soccer look some classic Mets style.

The base of the shirt is a vintage, cream color. The Mets use this tone with their relatively new pinstriped home jersey; I happen to really like the tone when it’s paired with a strong, deep color and something bright and organic like orange (as the Giants also do successfully). The orange stands out most prominently as the primary color of the Mets’ interlocking ‘NY’ logo, a design classic with almost a century of history. This logo serves as the club crest, and is backed, ever so slightly, by a crisp blue drop shadow. Below the crest are two red dots - if you look closely, those are New York apples, like the kind that come out of the top hat after Mets home runs - to signify the club’s two legendary championships (1969, 1986). In the battle to own the hearts, minds, and back pages of New York, I thought this “big apple” touch might be one the Mets would embrace.

Blue appears in several applications on the jersey, always in a strong but muted, royal tone, in keeping with the vintage style. The collar gets the blue treatment; so does the jersey manufacturer’s mark - Fila’s ‘F’ - across from the crest. I chose Fila here because they’re a quintessential New York old-school style brand and seem a great fit with the attitude of the club and the city, especially during the 80s as I first experienced them. I will say that this was a close call due almost exclusively to the Beastie Boys’ advice never to rock Fila, (and to only rock Adidas), but this will be the one and only time I disagree with the wise sages of the five boroughs.

The blue tone also appears in a few other key applications: first, as a part of a shoulder piping effect, and second, as a muted pinstripe base layer. Each of these elements has significance for the look. The shoulder piping - blue in the center, bordered by orange on each side - pays homage to the Mets famous 1980s jerseys and the striking piping effect they carried up from toes to shoulders. The pinstripes are a Mets, and a New York, tradition, and deserve to be represented; however, I didn’t want them to dominate the look, so they fade very much into the background. The only exception is in the jersey’s one extra design flourish - at chest level, behind the manufacturer mark and crest, the pinstripes fade up to full blue color, forming a slight arc. This effect recreates the look of those famous New York City suspension bridges I was so enamored of as a kid - and is a callback to the bridge featured prominently in the Mets’ club logo. You can imagine the bridge kind of rising out of the city mist as represented here, and I think it gives the jersey a whimsical, Gotham-esque feel.

Citigroup is the club’s sponsor, and is a straightforward choice as the current stadium’s naming partner. I’ve chosen to represent the logo with a knockout, white-on-cream effect; you can imagine the jersey’s texture raised up a bit where the logo is applied. This look gives the Mets a chance to feature a sponsor, but doesn’t entirely cede the “visual purity” game to the cross-town Yankees. The jersey back is finished with the player name and number in blue-over-orange, and the M.L.B. logo. I sincerely hope this overall look would give the Mets elements of both the friendly, forward-looking club they’re becoming, and the urban, big-city club they’ll continue to be in my memory.

Washington Nationals

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This project has often led me to interesting places. Sometimes that’s been due to a fascinating visual discovery (the Dodgers wore checkered pinstripes!?), but other times, it’s been because, when digging into teams’ histories, I’ve stumbled into details that raise fundamental - even philosophical - questions: Where do clubs come from? Can they be born fully-formed, or does it take tears and patience and faith rewarded to make a uniform into an emotional talisman? Is a team that alters itself entitled to keep its bond with history? Say, if it changes players? Or owners? Or uniforms? Or stadiums? Or names? Or places? Can passionate fanship lie dormant, or does it die for good when circumstances change? Did we really once just go out to a ballgame the way we’d go out to a movie or a tractor pull, and end up surprised at how much we started to care? Are beloved sports identities all wonderful mistakes - adopted stray dogs that we grew to think of as family - or are clubs manipulating us with shrewd and purposeful behavior? Do we expect emotional attachment from baseball, right from the first pitch? Do baseball clubs expect it, unrequited, from us?

And just who are the Washington Nationals, anyway? Because the history of baseball in Washington ticks a lot of those boxes, and maybe even a few more.

These Nationals can’t be the original Washington Nats, right? That club, also known popularly as the “Senators” - the nicknames were interchangeable for a long time - moved to Minneapolis in the 1950s. And these Nationals can’t be the club that was formed from scratch to replace that team - the one that was given the original Senators’ name and colors - in the 1960s. That second club lasted only a decade in Washington before moving to Arlington, Texas. And these Nationals have no connection to the Baltimore Orioles or their fans, who’ve roosted just north of D.C. for generations and call Washington a “home” market? Right? Or the Montreal Expos, who existed as a club for almost a third of a century before being ripped from their home and their identity, their infrastructure used to form the core of this new Washington club? Does any of that history matter?

Perhaps its best to reframe, and to assume a fresh start. Let’s call the Nats a brand new team, born from scratch just a few years ago, with a new nickname and no history. Well, except for the city they play in, of course. D.C. has a long and relevant baseball hsitory. And the “Nationals” nickname, well, that goes back to the beginning too. And the clubs’ curly ‘W’ logo, which is also a callback to the Sentators’ identity. And the red-white-and-navy colors, for the most part, are what the old club wore. And the fans, many of whom date back to the days of Senators, versions I and II, aren’t blind to history. And the current club’s habit of wearing uniforms to honor (if not claim) the Senators’ past success doesn’t quite sweep the past under the rug. So it’s a fresh start… with complications. But how much tradition is appropriate for these Nationals to celebrate?

I tried to simplify these ideas for the sake of this project: a) the club should be proudly and uniquely Washingtonian, b) they should inherit symbols, but not histories, from their predecessors, and c) they should push their identity into new places. In short, they should prepare to be loved by a fanbase who have had their hearts broken before, and who have dissipated over the years, but they should not claim that love as a birthright.

From a visual standpoint, the Nationals are adhering fairly closely to these ideas, and I tried to capture that spirit with this soccer-style interpretation. This Nationals jersey contains several stylistic nods to history, but very little in the way of direct, explicit historical reference. Let’s start with the crest. As has become commonplace during this project, the club’s cap mark, the curly ‘W’, serves as the crest. Like Atlanta’s swerving ‘A’, and the Indians’ dynamic ‘I’, the W captures a sense of positive motion in its form, and is just a beautiful shape to behold. I can understand, even beyond the nostalgia it inspires, why it was brought back when the club was constituted. You won’t, however, see any stars under that crest; the Nationals need to earn their own. (You also won’t see strokes or outlines around this mark the way the club applies them now, because I believe it dilutes the power of the visual in this case.)

Next, we turn to the color red: it dominates the jersey. This is part of “pushing the identity into new places”; the Nats have a chance to take the color red and run with it, turning it into a calling card with their unique branding attributes. Yes, both the Reds and Red Sox have obvious ties to red, and to an extent the Phillies and Angels have made it a signature color as well. But those identities are not standing in the way of the Nats making something uniquely distinctive happen with their use of the color. Here, the jersey conveys a simple, powerful statement with the use of one dominant, primary tone - not unlike Manchester United or Liverpool, or even South Korea’s national soccer side. And here, as those clubs have also discovered, white touches look quite strong on a deep red canvas, so the W crest, color, sleeve piping and shirt bottom lend a sense of bright power to the design.

Besides red and white, dark navy makes an appearance on the shirt, in the manufacturer’s logo (Adidas) and the sponsor, Sprint Mobile. (Confidential to Verizon Wireless: You were my first choice here, but your logo is just too dang bad; I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe next time.) The navy lends a counterweight to the white touches, and separates the sponsor and manufacturer identities from the club. Navy also shows up in one of the shirt’s design touches: a circular “grid” pattern that starts on the jersey’s body, and progresses towards the crest-side shoulder where it is crowned with a arching navy stripe. This detail is a simplified representation of the inside of the U.S. Capitol building’s domed Rotunda - if you had walked into the Rotunda and looked up, the detail on the jersey represents a slice of what you’d see. The real Rotunda ceiling is unspeakably beautiful, and seeing it in person is one of those moments that makes you believe in the power of Washington to do great things (something that’s increasingly difficult to come by as time goes on). The lines contained within the Rotunda design also make, when simplified, a pretty great pattern for a soccer shirt, and you can imagine the grid rendered in different fabric treatments with very subtle tonal variation.

The last important touch here is the striped sleeve ends. This detail serves two purposes; first, if viewed as two red stripes on a white background, it creates the basis for the beautiful city flag of Washington, District of Columbia. Or, if you choose to see three white stripes on a red background, you can see how Adidas might be able to sneak in a little branded calling card. The design element works either way, and gives the jersey some nice balance to boot. Around the back, the Rotunda motif recurs, and the player name and number (in the Nats’ own typeface) are rendered in simple white below the M.L.B. logo.

There’s no easy way to understand exactly who these Nationals are. The fact that the club has made a home in Washington, is winning on the field, and is asking for a chance to excite those in their community is really the only allowable metric by which they can be judged. With a balance of history and forward-looking style, the Nationals can (in a soccer context, anyway) start creating their own story.

Philadelphia Phillies

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I’ve “cheated” on the Red Sox with other baseball caps twice in my life. Once was a couple-week fling with a black Chicago White Sox cap; we covered that in an earlier piece, but suffice to say there was seventh-grade social coolness at stake. The other time was a longer, stranger relationship with the Phillies’ red and white cap (with the blue button) when I was about 15 or so. I just liked it. I didn’t care much for the team itself, or the city (though I have become quite fond of the latter, and have no beef with the former). I never stopped being a Red Sox fan. I just really liked the look of that Phillies cap, and I had to try it out for a few months. I wish I could tell you that I regret it, but I don’t. It wasn’t better, it was just… different.

(Ahem.)

This was right after the club had ended their “maroon” era and re-introduced the still-current red and white scheme (with blue highlights) in the early 1990s. It also coincided with the 1993 World Series, which was a thrilling affair both athletically and visually. I never understood quite why the Phillies made the change; after all, they were the only club using maroon in the majors, and still would be today were they to have stuck with it; and their simple, slithery P with-a-baseball-in-the-middle logo was famous, well recognized and loved. That color scheme - maroon and white, often with powder-blue road jerseys - had even brought the club their first and only World Series victory in team history, in 1980. It was Mike Schmidt’s mustache; it was Steve Carlton’s untamed locks; it was Juan Samuel’s tight pants. But no matter, the Phillies changed anyway, to a new “historic” look that was just as good as the one they left behind. Minor-chord maroon became a deep, major red; the powder blue all but disappeared, save for a dab of royal blue here and there on the jerseys and cap, and the entire package seemed to acquire a patina of history, whereas the maroon identity was always a bit modern and slick. The Phillies also established a signature typeface - rounded, narrow, clean, and almost bubbly - that would become distinctive in a very short time.

Within just a few years the club had entered a renaissance, and by the mid–2000s was a perennial World Series title favorite, winning one in 2008 to go with the 1980 victory. And the team had a happy circumstance on its hands - a well-loved successful primary identity, and a sought-after, retro-cool older identity - the maroon and blue look - that was perfectly suited for merchandise sales and throwback nights. The only issue? The identities feel like two separate clubs, and they are equally important to modern Phillies fans. Solving a visual challenge like this is exactly what the soccer jersey was made for.

(The Phillies’ visual history doesn’t start and stop with the current red/white and retro maroon, of course; they have worn almost every color in the rainbow. Green in the early 1900s; a season in yellow and blue in the 30s; navy blue in the 40s, and light blue - not just in the 70s and 80s with the Mike Schmidt jerseys, but in the 40s when the team wanted to add a mascot, and picked, wildly, the Blue Jay. The Phillies wore blue jay emblems on their jerseys for a few seasons! Adds a twist to the 1993 World Series, no? The Phillies are close to the perfect candidate for soccer-style interpretation; they seem very comfortable trying on new visual identities and weird color schemes without worrying that their core brand is being diluted.)

The fútbol-style jersey here references the team’s current visual template and weaves in some history to boot. The base is vintage white, perfect for a club as venerable as the Phillies. The crest is the cap mark, the lovely new-and-old red ‘P’. Collars, shirt ends and the jersey bottom are done in a deep, chalky blue, which works as a version of the club’s current blue color, but gives just a powder-y suggestion of their visual past, too. The sponsor, the popular Wawa chain of convenience stores, will be instantly understandable to anybody who’s ever a) spent time in the Philly region or b) yearned to order a foot-long sub (sorry, hoagie) via a touch-screen computer. The jersey is made by Italian brand Erreà, one of my favorite smaller soccer kit-makers, and one (quite frankly) I wanted to use before finishing this project. Philly seemed like the perfect chance.

Two details stand out here. First, behind the P crest run two diagonal lines forming a sash. The bottom line is red, and the upper is maroon. This neatly references the two beloved modern Phillies identities in an understated and elegant way. The sash effect is continued past the crest to the shoulder, but not before passing beneath stars, one above each line. The powder blue star above the maroon line references the 1980 championship, in that clubs’ color scheme; the darker blue star above the red line references the more recent 2008 title. One last little confluence; the Phillies use two blue stars to dot the “i”s in the script across their home jersey; this keeps those stars alive.

The second small detail is something I love about the Phillies - they’re the only Major League club to put their players’ number on their jersey sleeves. This, of course, begs to be recreated in a soccer context, so on one sleeve, a numeral patch is implemented. This patch serves double duty, as the number is contained within a pictogram of Philadelphia’s famous Liberty Bell - which happens to make a nice reference to both the city and the club’s secondary logo.

Around back, the sash continues through the rear number, in Philly’s distinctive font; it and the player name (below the M.L.B. logo are done in the same red color as the crest. The entire look is a charming reference to the Phils’ recent, successful history - both retro and present-day at once. I hope the club, and their fans, would embrace it. I might even be tempted to stray from the Red Sox for just a moment and slip this jersey on for a few minutes (you know, when nobody was looking).

And there you go, that’s the N.L. East, and with it, all 30 clubs in Major League Baseball! It’s been quite a project; thanks for reading. If you have comments or feedback, I’m listening on Twitter (using #soccercontext) or over on Reddit at /r/baseball. These jerseys are \\…. scraaatch!

(That was supposed to be a needle scratching on a vinyl record. I apologize; my foley budget isn’t huge here.)

Wait, There’s More!

I’ve had a great time writing and designing these pieces, and a big part of the fun has been digging into the past to learn more about teams’ visuals and traditions. Again and again, I’d find and follow rabbit holes that led to some fantastically obscure baseball history. The chaotic color and convention sprinkled through baseball lore is unfathomably rich. I was able to reference a bit of that with this project, but there are so many defunct athletic identities out there, I didn’t want to pass up the chance to do some interesting Soccer Out of Context work with some legendary clubs that don’t live on in our present era.

So here, I’m announcing the next phase of Soccer Out of Context pieces - a fictional league beyond the American and National, if you will. In fact I’m christening it the Ghosts and Grandfathers League. And I want you to help me decide which clubs are featured.

Here’s how it’ll work. Every few weeks or so, as I can, I’d like to do a further S.O.O.C. design from a pool of historic identities. (I’ll start with baseball clubs, but this could go anywhere, really.) Some of these names will have prominent histories; some existed in brief flourishes and are not well-documented. Some are the ancestors of existing professional franchise (i.e., “grandfathers”); others became visual dead ends (or “ghosts”). But all present some really interesting visual opportunities. Interested?

I’ve put together a preliminary ballot for entry into the Ghosts and Grandfathers League. Here are the first dozen Ghosts and Grandfathers League candidates (you can click on the thumbnails for further reading):

St. Louis Browns Houston Colt .45s Boston Bees Seattle Pilots Montreal Expos Cleveland Spiders Washington Senators Chicago Orphans Indianapolis Clowns Louisville Colonels Troy Trojans New York Highlanders

This is where I’ll need your help. I’d like you to vote for the one identity (from this ballot) you’d want to see featured next in a Soccer Out of Context piece. We’ll hold the voting open for a week or so, and then call a winner; they will officially be inaugurated into the S.O.O.C. Ghosts & Grandfathers League, I’ll do an out-of-context soccer design for that identity. If all goes well we’ll rinse and repeat every few weeks.

By the way: if you have your own ideas for clubs that should be considered, I want to hear about them! Just find me on Twitter or send me your idea by email (m at mwillis.com). The only rule is that the identity you mention should not represent a current major league team. If I get one or more write-in candidates that surpass a minumum threshold, I’ll add them to the ballot for the next round; meanwhile, low vote-getters will be dropped. (Yee-haw, promotion and relegation in American sports!)

I hope you’ll play along, and I look forward to seeing what you guys think. So: vote!

⇢ CLICK HERE TO VOTE ⇠

…and, back to your regular programming.

These jerseys are created purely for fun; I’ve had a bunch of requests to buy designs like these, and I wish I could sell them, but they include licensed MLB property, so as of right now I can’t. Soon, though, I’ll have some wearable designs you might enjoy purchasing if you like soccer aesthetics and clean design work like this. If you’d like details when they’re available,

follow me on Twitter (@m_willis), or
leave me your email address in the form at the very bottom of this page.

And drop any time by for more soccer and design discussion (as always, both in and out of context).

If you made it this far, you might enjoy a few other uniform, soccer and identity-related pieces I’ve put together. First, you can buy original soccer-inspired t-shirt designs at the just-launched Clean Sheet Co - our first shirt is for US Soccer fans, and it’s called The Gadsden. Also check out the series Re-booting the New England Revolution and What Makes a USA Soccer Kit?. I’m also tracking seasonal soccer tables, beautifully, at the Seasons project. If you like tech writing, I do a little of that too now and then. Thanks again!

Friday Music

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:57:49 -0500

“The Void” by Gaps. Gaps are from Brighton, UK, so I’m predisposed to like them. I enjoy this song because it seems like it could soundtrack a late spring night down by the beach (where they’re from) or a whiteout snow storm (where I’m from, currently).

The Albany Town T

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:39:00 -0500

First, Schenectady. Now Albany gets the Town T treatment. Orders for both shirts are now open, for a limited time, here.

Urban Portraits

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:39:00 -0500

Morning Commute, Elevated Line (2013)

A new piece in the Urban Portraits series, and the first of the year. Limited edition prints are available; inquire for details. More pieces in the series are in the gallery.

Soccer Out of Context: the AL Central

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:39:00 -0500

Indulge me for just a second.

Jake glanced out at the mound. Ricky looked a little shell-shocked, but the moment was undeniably his now. The shadow of Haywood’s hulking frame flickered off to the left of Jake’s peripheral vision, every little chopping check-swing designed to intimidate. And why wouldn’t it? The Yankees had been here before. The Indians hadn’t. Jake returned the last warmup pitch, shook out a few quick, involuntary hop-stretches as he always did before settling into his crouch, and prepared himself to talk Haywood’s ear off the second he stepped into the box.

Sixty-odd feet away, Ricky toed the rubber, as ready as he’d ever be. He tried to lock in as the stadium tensed up around him. This was it; this was the whole dream, strung out on a line. One of those excruciating, salivating, only-in-baseball confrontations had been laid at his feet. 2–2 game, ninth inning, bases loaded, slugger up, loser goes home. No matter what else Ricky had done, or would do, he’d always have this.

It was impossible not to sense the moment; everyone in the stadium - hell, the state - could feel it. And during that brief, hanging hesitation between the last warmup toss and a hardy “play ball” from behind the plate, Roger Dorn did too. He bolted from his spot at third towards the mound. Ricky looked over in surprise, and then briefly off into the distance, hoping something would save him. Now? Really? Ah, shit, Jake muttered to himself. Of course Dorn would do this now.

If Vaughn looked nervous before, he looked positively petrified as Dorn closed the distance between them. Which direction brought more intimidation? Straight ahead, facing a six-three, two-forty, goateed, chaw-spitting behemoth dressed in New York greys? Or on his right, in the personage of his sniveling, too-small, too-proud and too-nervous Cleveland teammate? The two hadn’t spoken in the hours since the fireballer’s dalliance with Dorn’s wife had become mutual knowledge. Dorn was arriving now. At least, Ricky thought, he’d have 60,000 witnesses to whatever the third baseman was about to do to him.

Dorn said nothing, not even after he did get to the pitcher. He simply chewed his gum with a measured, prickish swagger, daring Ricky to talk first. After a beat, Dorn held out his right hand. Ricky did what pitchers do when a superior holds out their hand for the ball; he gave it. In a sport where anything can and does happen, in a season where seemingly everything had happened to the Indians, there was no moment less predictable than the one about to unfold.

Rubbing the baseball like a talisman, Dorn sniffed. “Let’s cut through the crap, Vaughn” he began. “I only got one thing to say to you.”

Here it came. Ricky stared meekly ahead at his cuckolded rival; behind the plate, Jake flinched. Dorn’s stare drilled through the pitcher’s novelty eyeglass frames and their thick lenses, and found Ricky’s bare eyes.

“Strike this. Mother. F*#@er. Out.”

He cuffed the ball back into Vaughn’s glove, unforgiving, but with unexpected accord. The crack of the leather sounded, and felt, like a slap to Ricky’s face. And then, with a maniacal squint, Dorn backed off, turned, and started to jog back to his station. Ricky’s mind went fuzzy-blank, then just as quickly, snapped into diamond-sharp focus. The crowd, once overwhelming, now sounded like a vicious guitar riff. A smirk curled its way across Ricky’s face.

Holy shit, Jake thought as he watched Ricky transform. He’s gonna strike this motherf*#@er out.

(The legends vary; some contend Dorn said simply “strike this, umm, guy out”, but those storytellers come from an incomprehensible and untrustworthy land known only by the initials “T.B.S.”)

All I can add to this scene and those of “the big game” that surround it - which together comprise one of my favorite fifteen minute blocks of recorded humanity - is that due to their involvement in Major League, the Indians will always be a sentimental favorite for me. Hell, I might like the fictonal 1989 Cleveland Indians more than I’ve liked most Red Sox squads. So as we approach the film’s 25th anniversary next year (feel old yet?), the least I can do is give the Indians a decent soccer-style jersey. Welcome to Soccer Out of Context: the A.L. Central! Let’s get started:

Cleveland Indians

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Before we leave Major League, I need to mention two things. First, manager Lou Brown could/should/would have been absolutely crucified for not taking out his 45-ish year-old starter in the ninth inning of a tie game after putting runners on second and third. Sure, the Yankees were free swingers in those days, but Eddie Harris had to have thrown about 150 snot-soaked pitches at that point. I could never make sense of the manager’s decision until I realized that Grady Little was an Indians bench coach before he came to the Red Sox. Then it all fell into place. Second, Ricky Vaughn has had a lot of influence on modern baseball culture - from entrance music to “eccentric closer” behavior. But my favorite lasting legacy Vaughn (as channeled by Charlie Sheen) left us with has to be the Arizona Diamondbacks logo, and the haircut it wears in tribute to him.

Cheers to Ricky Vaughn, a true baseball classic.

Now, to the jersey. The Indians have some associations that make a project like this harder than it could be. The Native American question, which I’ll encounter both here and in the next piece (when we tackle the Braves) isn’t an easy one. It creates a conundrum for the Indians that’s got aspects of tradition, changing social mores, merchandising, political correctness, symbolism and simple human nature. I’m not going to have a lengthy discussion about the place of ethnic mascots in modern sport. This isn’t the right forum for that. (Now, wildlife-on-wildlife mascot violence? I’m ready to take a stand there. Action must be taken… to strongly encourage it.).

So for the Indians, I will invoke what could be seen as a modified McGwire approach: I’m not here to design simply about the past. This project is built around transferring what’s fun about baseball into the world of what’s fun about soccer. In the larger scheme of things, I think this whole project is fun because soccer and its visual traditions seem fresh to American audiences. Soccer gives us a new, but completely natural lens through which to reinterpret what we love about our favorite teams. In the hypothetical world I’ve been working in, teams would be looking ahead, and bringing the best of their traditions into soccer’s visual landscape. And to be honest, as beloved as he is, the Chief Wahoo mark is not an example of the Indians putting their future first. So the mark, as it’s used today, is not in the kit.

Let’s talk about what is there. First, the base color is just off-white, with accents in vibrant red and navy, a proud and traditional Cleveland baseball look. The team has been wearing some version of blue since its inception more than a century ago - including on the most awesomely arrogant jersey of all time - and red for almost as long (it was added in the late 20s). I chose contrasting sleeves for the Indians, in navy, both to honor their recent “rennaissance” teams of the mid–90s, who wore that look (and today’s club, which use it as an alternate), and to reference the long relationship both the city and the club have with Lake Erie. The navy fabric here carries a rippled texture that subtly suggests lines of waves, over a great expanse, gently rolling into the “coastline” of the jersey torso, a minor effect that gives the whole look a bit of extra personality. The sleeve design peaks at the shoulders, curving around their top, for different stylistic touch than other “colored sleeve” concepts have. The collar is also navy, and carries a triangular neckline design that again helps lend some extra distinctiveness.

The logo here is the Indians’ curvy “I” mark, a beautiful cursive shape that, to me, suggests a feather, and works far more elegantly as a crest mark than does either Wahoo (for reasons outlined above) or the back-to-the-old-school block “C” mark the team is now using more frequently. While I’m all for the C, using it as a soccer crest made the team seem too high school-esque - there was a pedestrian nature to the final product. I’m a big fan of the “I” and how striking it looks by itself, especially in the team’s scarlet red.

A strip of tri-color piping shoots up from the base of the jersey, centered under the crest and meeting it above the sponsor mark. This red, white and blue feature ties much about the jersey together; it’s the key component to the team’s soccer look and feel. First, the stripe is a direct homage to the jerseys the club wore throughout my 80s childhood, covering the Indians’ time in the A.L. East and the setting of Major League. Check out the jerseys worn by both real and fictional players during the late 80s - the triple-striped piping runs up either side of the Indians’ white uniform in this exact configuration. It should come as no surprise, then, Cleveland’s flag shows those same colors in that same arrangement. Honoring both the history of the city and the club at once is a nice achievement here.

But there’s one more level to how perfectly the piping fits, and that’s to do with the jersey’s prominent sponsor, Ford Motor Company. As anyone who lived through the most recent presidential election will attest, Ohio is a major automobile industry hotbed. While Michigan gets more notoriety, Ohio boasts some of the highest per-capita auto industry employment figures in the country. Ford has an incredibly lengthy history in Cleveland, basing a good chunk of their operation along Lake Erie. In fact, for decades, Ford produced a flagship product, the high-end engine for their famous Mustang performance car (among other vehicles), in Cleveland. The Ford 335 V8, produced until the mid–80s, was much more commonly known as the Cleveland V8, and it packed a wallop. Although the engine has given way to successors, Ford still maintains plants in the Cleveland metro area and still proudly produces American-made products there.

So where’s the tie-in? Take a look at the classic Ford Mustang logo sometime - you may see three stripes (behind a horse in full gallop) that look familiar.

A few final notes on the jersey’s front: the two small features, one red, one blue, above the piping and below the logo. These are two small Chief Wahoo feathers - just the feather from his headdress - each one standing for an Indians World Series championship. Other teams get stars; the Indians, of course, would want feathers in their collective cap to mark the occasion (and you could see, with a few more titles, a really cool, full headdress emerging from this theme). Also, the manufacturer here is a fairly modest but viable Ohio-based sportswear company, Holloway, who I imagine would be thrilled to get the call to make the Indians jersey.

There’s not much surprising on the jersey’s reverse - just a simple block name and number, the MLB logo, and for symmetry, a small continuation of the piping - just enough to give the rear side a bit of extra personality. This is my homage to the Indians - a team with an outsized influence on my baseball-loving youth - and I hope the team would wear it well.

Chicago White Sox

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Around the time I was in junior high, the White Sox seemed to explode. Their new all-black look, the gothic, blackletter Sox font, Frank Thomas out-slugging everybody in his first couple of seasons - it all happened at once in a supernova of coolness. Black ‘Sox’ caps (along with Falcons and Sharks hats) were so prominent in my cheese-and-crackers, suburban east coast school district, you would have thought we were all about to drop mix tapes and get “Thug Life” tattoos immediately after school. (Of course, when paired with overall jeans - one strap down yo! - a button-up silk shirt from Chess King, and tons of L.A. Looks hair gel, some of the cool factor we thought the Sox hat gave us was misplaced.) Why do I mention this, aside from some desire to relive my own fashion shame? Up until that point in the early 1990s, the White Sox were so far from visually popular, I couldn’t have told you what their logo was (before the gothic-style S-o-x, it was a forgettable curly C), and furthermore, the White Sox look felt so fresh because it was obviously traditional, but none of us had ever seen it before. It was almost like, with the black and white look, the Sox were a brand new team that had never existed, but one fully formed and with the right historical “feel” to it. And there’s a reason for that - until their current look took hold, the White Sox had banked a ton of interesting history, but had also gone almost a century without ever establishing a permanent look at all.

Some clubs can draw a straight line between their earliest uniforms and their present look without hitting too many unexpected curves or left turns. The White Sox are not one of those teams. Far from straight, the path that follows their visual history looks a lot like that one really curvy road in San Francisco that’s always in car commercials. Like the San Diego Padres, an N.L. team that has never really settled on an identity, the White Sox have been visual nomads, wandering the sartorial hinterlands, camping out for a time in various looks (and when I say camp, I mean camp). Only in the last two decades has the club gained some consistency and maintained a look that has become iconic.

While the Sox are like the Padres in their willingness to vary their identity, they are unlike the San Diego club in one very important way: they have an extensive major league legacy. The White Sox are an original American League team, one of only a few to exist in the spot of their founding over a century ago. They played in one of baseball’s beloved older stadiums well into the 1990s, and they have a prominent (if not always honorable) role in baseball history - so the team is not without tradition. But they’ve also always competed for attention with their cross-town neighbors, the Cubs, whose visual identity is so fixed it might as well be covered in ivy. Changing looks was one way to differentiate the South Siders from the Cubbies, and grab a few eyeballs in the process - and when you’re owned by Bill Veeck for a large part of your existence, the creative pursuit of eyeballs becomes part of your DNA.

How to balance tradition and visual volatility in a White Sox soccer jersey design? Here’s what I came up with. First, the jersey’s primary color scheme: a tonal combination of black (on the torso) and deep silvers (on the shoulders and arms). Black has emerged as the White Sox’ identifying color, and unlike other uniform trends they have explored, has managed to stick around for a while. Over the tones, a very, very slight pinstripe effect is present - just enough to catch the light at the right angles. This calls out the current Sox pinstriped look, but in a way that avoids anything too garish (or, on the restrained side, too Yankee-esque).

White is used sparingly, and where it is used, it absolutely flies off the jersey. The resurrected, now permanent, interlocked blackletter Sox logo mark in white becomes the crest; on the sleeves, small “winged sock” insignias are rescued from the past and installed as design flourishes at the ends of the arms. Excepting the third star beneath the logo, standing for the Sox’ most recent Major League title, there is no other white on the front of the shirt. (On the reverse, white is also used for the block name and numeral combination.) Astride the crest is the Reebok vector; the company seemed like a good fit for a club like the White Sox, as they, like the Sox, are in an eternal, binary relationship with a more popular rival brand (Nike, Cubs). The sponsor is the True Value line of hardware stores, who maintain a headquarters in the Chicago area and are certainly a fit for the baseball-loving demographic. Both the Reebok and True Value coloration is intended to be kind of a shimmery, dark silver that would stand out from the jersey, but not detract from its visual balance.

Two additional features are important to call out here. First, along the collar line, small but prominent navy / slate blue panels relieve the jersey from being entirely monochromatic. Besides creating an interesting visual interaction with the dark black tones, the slate blue is important to the Sox history: it was the color (bleeding back and forth into black) of early, successful teams of the aughts, teens and twenties - including Chicago’s first championship team, the 1906 club, which wore head-to-toe slate/navy blue on the road. (Hence, the first slate blue star under the crest.) The Sox stayed black and grey for a time (including a second title in 1917), and in the 1960s, as color television changed uniform design, the Sox changed between black and navy for an extra visual flair. Later, when our national 1970s-misses-the-1900s design phase began - a strange era to look back on, as it’s kind of retro-retro from a modern perspective, the Sox brought back a version of their 1900s look, including the navy (of course, to appease the disco gods, they paired it with wider Sonny Bono lapels, floppy, untucked shirt ends, a “SOX” hat with a font straight out of Tron, and, on occasion, shorts). There is a place for a reminder - in the form of a (very modest) lapel element - that calls back the role slate blue has played in the Sox’ history. (Red, too, has played a supporting role, but not one that could be augmented easily without creating a too-busy design. I would suggest, however, that perhaps a second Sox soccer jersey use white and red as primary elements).

Second, the black and silver tones along the shoulder lines create a strong, modern looking soccer jersey - but they have a bit of a hidden meaning, too. The design can be thought of as two overlapping panels - in front, a deep black, lightly pinstriped panel with a curved top edge that touches the collar’s base; behind it, a dark silver panel with straight, angled edges that converge where the collar meets the shoulder seams. These aren’t random design choices, though they do work well as stand-alone elements; they are the outlines of the outfields of the Sox’ two homes, one atop the other. U.S. Cellular Field, with its curved centerfield, sits on top and creates the primary black panel (think of straightaway centerfield as where the black touches the base of the neck, and the two foul poles where the black touches the sleeves). Behind it, fading into history, is the famous outline of Comiskey Park’s boxy, angled outfield that ran at nearly 45-degree angles, in from the left and right field foul poles to a flat centerfield wall that, represented on the jersey, runs along the top of the collar. In this way, the Sox honor the two homes that have taken them through more than a century of history.

With loads of popularity, almost two decades of consistency, and an elusive World Series title under their belt in their current black and white scheme, it doesn’t seem like the White Sox will be changing things any time soon. I’m not sure I could have predicted any of that in junior high. Here’s hoping kids that age now - who are as likely to have a favorite European soccer team as they are to love baseball - would find something to like in this jersey, and that South Side fans everywhere would appreciate it.

Minnesota Twins

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Of all the domes and plastic fields baseball has gone through, Minnesota’s was my favorite; it had interesting features, like the “baggie” outfield wall, and anecdotally, the Twins always seemed to take the most pride in and advantage of their home, even more than other dome-based teams. But time, and prevailing wisdom, moved on; baseball on top of organic matter and under the stars seems to be the order of the day. So when I heard that the Twins were finally leaving the Metrodome behind for an open-roof, natural grass stadium, it made me happy. And when I thought about how 2010-era Twins fans must have felt, walking out of the runway tunnel and seeing green grass, blue sky and their home colors together for the first time in decades, I knew what I wanted the Twins’ soccer look to embody: a cool, crisp breath of fresh fresh air.

The Twins had already left a dome behind once before, of course - the dome that tops the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.. Considering how - and if - to incorporate the club’s origins as the (first) Washington Senators was a tricky part of the process for the Twins. The single franchise, now 114 years old (more if you count it’s Western League origins in Kansas City), has spent more seasons representing Washington (60) than it has Minnesota. The Senators, though known mostly for being a reliably mediocre club, also won a World Series title during their time there. How best to make sure the legacy of the entire franchise is honored?

The new stadium; the history - that’s all before we arrive at traditional Twins visuals and characteristics. The logo history that has swung between ‘TC’ and ‘M’ marks; the unique bi-cameral urban fanbase, the way the Metrodome played into the team’s identity; and the classic, victorious Twins uniforms that Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbeck and the crew wore while bringing home two titles for Minnesota during the late 80s and early 90s. Through it all, the Twins have always seemed like a friendly, comfortable brand - even when they were threatened with extinction in the late 90s, they seemed to keep their head down and play ball. Like two good-natured, uniformed giants having a friendly chat across the Mississippi, the Twins and their fans just seem like nice people.

These elements led me to the design before you. First, the “fresh air” idea. I tried to represent that “breath of crisp, clean spring air” feeling with the simple, lightweight tones of white and very bright grey. As most M.L.B. teams do, the Twins have had a strong connection to white; their grey look, to me, is almost as famous, and maybe more distinctive because of its use of road pinstripes. So the jersey is halved - with light grey on the right, white on the left - but the halves are not full color blocks. Instead, they blend into vertical stripes along the center of the shirt. I thought this was a good metaphor for the blended Minneapolis and St. Paul metro region that the team calls home, and it dovetails with a classic soccer vertical stripe pattern. I did call out the regional identities just a bit, though - on the shirt’s sleeves, in a band pattern, you’ll find very subtle outlines. Those are city skylines - on the left (west, if you’re looking at the jersey) sleeve, the skyline of Minneapolis, and on the right/east sleeve, St. Paul’s civic outline. The skylines wrap around the sleeve in a band pattern, and are very subtle details, just barely darker than the fabric they appear on.

Keeping with the fresh and clean idea, there is very little embellishment on the jersey. The crest provides the one giant splash of color, in the team’s traditional navy and red. I’ve chosen the Twins’ most notable symbol (and one that I, frankly, didn’t understand as a little kid), the interlocked ‘TC’ mark. It’s the perfect, evocative brand for the modern team - much more interesting (in my opinion) than the club’s block letter ‘M’. Above the crest, three stars - one blue, two red. I’ve made the decision here to include the world championship the franchise won in Washington, which gets a navy star; I see no reason for the Twins or their fans to take anything but pride in the accomplishment. But since that victory occurred during a separate chapter of the team’s history, a different color is applied. The two red stars stand, of course, for the club’s Minnesota-based victories in 1987 and 1991. One final crest detail - in the negative space to the right of the T, and in the “jaws” of the C, I’ve represented the silhouette of the state of Minnesota, who deserve recognition on the same stage as the urban areas the team represents.

Paired with the crest is the kit manufacturer, Kappa, who make lovely soccer jerseys and whose “paired figures” logo could pass for a pair of twins (it’s a girl and a guy, but who sweats those details?). And then, we have the jersey sponsor. If you didn’t know better, it almost blends into the jersey design; but because the Target target is such a well-understood mark, we all do know better. There are several advantages to using Target. First, the company has national market, but is locally based, and already sponsors the team’s beautiful new field. Second, because the Target bulls-eye is so well known, it can be rendered in subtle tones and without the company name, and still have quite a visible impact. (But, unlike somebody wearing a bright red target on their chest, it doesn’t seem weird.) The logo is symmetrical, and fits in to the design smoothly. A jersey that came together like this would require the cooperation of team, manufacturer and sponsor, but I feel like the Twins and Target - with a strong and friendly partnership - could pull this off. Final details include a block name on the back in navy, and the number, in red, set in a slightly curvier block font face than the standard M.L.B. block, to echo some of the curved angles found in the ‘TC’ logo.

Not every jersey can weave the team, sponsor and regional identity quite so closely together - sometimes it’s simply not possible or practical. If I were the Twins, soccer club for a day, this is the direction I would work towards.

Kansas City Royals

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Bo Jackson calling for time, not getting it, then homering almost by accident; George Brett flying out of the dugout in a rage to protest a home run that was revoked after his bat was inspected for excessive pine tar. Even more than their 1985 title, those moments sum up the Royals to me (and they have a kind of poetic balance, too - together, they’re a strong reminder there’s no guarantee that baseball will give you what you deserve). What do they have in common? Besides making me thankful for YouTube, they each happened in powder blue. The Royals legacy is tied up in their distinctive visuals - the crisp white and royal blue of their home jersey, and the rich, lighter blue of their road look. The latter, of course, was the look for the moments I mentioned, and many more; the powder blue visiting uniform, with crisp white letters and royal accents has always been a particular hallmark of the Royals’ style.

Seemingly around the same time that the traditionally competitive and successful Royals started to lose more than they won, they left powder blue behind. The club made the switch from powder blue to road grey, and even threw in some experiments with black, but has never seemed as threatening, or as interesting, in any newer style. I wanted to do two things with this KC soccer look: call out the growing promise of the modern club and the region it represents, and bring back the powerful, distinctive powder blue.

So the jersey has the traditional visiting blue tone. It’s a vibrant, completely unique look in major league baseball, and something the Royals could, and should, wholly own. The collar (in a clean, mandarin style), arm ends and shirt bottom are royal blue to accent and frame the powder tone; the manufacturer and sponsor marks are in white to evoke the white “Royals” script on those powder blues. Together the combination is quite beautiful.

The Royals have, in my opinion, the most soccer-ready logo in baseball. Their crown-topped team logo makes a perfect soccer crest, and fits easily above the heart. At the base of the angled crest, a single star for the Royals’ memorable 1985 title is represented in white. Balancing the crest is a white Nike swoosh; I can’t help but associate Nike (via Bo Jackson) with the club. Below each, the club’s sponsor in also rendered in white, and it’s an interesting one: Google, and their revolutionary Fiber service which is currently available only in the Kansas City metro area - and is making that region famous for its incredible high-fidelity internet connection. (Tech businesses are actually flocking to the zones where Fiber has been activated, and though Google is looking to push the product out past Kansas City, while the region has such a technological advantage, there’s a real chance a Silicon Prairie scene could take root there.)

Two slight flourishes complete the jersey’s design - first, a horizontal stripe is created in negative space, bisecting the chest and the angled portion of the crest. The stripe is defined by an almost-imperceptible, faded white gradient; through that white effect, very simple stripes shoot up and terminate at various points. This effect does two things. First, it simulates the famous outfield fountains at the Royals’ longtime Kauffman Stadium home. The blue stripes become the individual water shoots; the white gradient gives a touch of mist to the effect. Second, the termination points create a slightly angled line that leads toward the crest - where that same angle is picked up by the shape of the crest, and is carried to it’s bottom point, where a single vertical stripe finds it and takes it down through the sponsor logo and all the way to the jersey bottom. This line - from the tips of the fountain shoots, over to the crest and down to the base - simulates the border between Kansas and Missouri, which Kansas City metro straddles. (It’s only fair to give a shout out to Sporting Kansas City, possibly the best-run franchise in M.L.S., for pioneering this symbolic concept on their crest.) The back of the jersey is free of any extra stylistic attributes - just a crisp white name and number, plus the M.L.B. logo, on a clean powder blue field.

The Royals’ most impressive look - their particular combination of light powder blue, royal blue and white - should be their visual calling card. With this soccer look, they could achieve something that’s not easy in a baseball landscape dominated by navies and reds - universal distinction.

Detroit Tigers

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The Tigers, like many Detroit institutions, stand for a lot more than baseball these days. There’s nothing new about that; after decades of turbulence and decay, and after so much civic loss, Detroit has lately been rallying around the good things that remain a part of the city. The Tigers are one of those things. There’s every reason to believe the city of Detroit is in the process of being reborn; any Tigers identity in the context of this project should express that optimism, hand in hand with the rich, lengthy tradition that the Tigers are fortunate to enjoy.

The first baseball game I ever attended was against Detroit; they, and I, were visitors at Fenway Park as the Tigers took on the 1986 Red Sox in an August afternoon contest. Bruce Hurst pitched; Marty Barrett had a few key hits, I believe. Chet Lemon, a name that would have stuck out to an eight year old kid, played for the Tigers, as did Alan Trammel, Lou Whitaker and the core of the club that put successful teams on the field throughout the mid to late 1980s. I brought my glove and had a chocolate ice cream bar. When I left Fenway that afternoon, one Red Sox victory later, I didn’t feel like a visitor any longer. But the Tigers would obviously remain a foreign challenger - and in my mind, because of the sensory cauldron of one’s first real game experience, I came to believe that Detroit and Boston were eternal blood rivals. It wasn’t until the Yankees were actually good - and from 1986, it would be a good many more years - before I felt that the Yanks were more of a threat than the Tigers, Blue Jays, Athletics, and other teams that stood between my Red Sox and great things. And because of that game, the Tigers, in their mid–80s pullover v-neck “DETROIT” jerseys, grey, with touches of navy and orange, will always be the central casting “visiting team” I think of when that generic term comes up.

To me, the Tigers are tradition: a single, unwavering home look, perfect baseball colors (white, navy and a splash of orange), and the expectation of a tough fight. I also get a sense that the Tigers do not apologize for the way most people regard the city they call home. They just do their best to make its citizens proud. And judging by what the old english Tigers “D” has come to mean to people there - something far greater than merely Tigers fanship - it’s fair to say that the team is part of a relationship with the city that has mutual positive benefit.

Here’s the jersey I created to honor those thoughts. It’s white, as any Tigers identity has to be - the club has a classic, plain look that simply must be celebrated in a project like this one. The elements on the jersey are just as simple: first, the stylized ‘D’ that goes back a century to the club’s founding becomes the crest. I chose to use the version of the D traditionally represented on the team’s jerseys, not the one on their hats, which is slightly different - I liked the sense of flair and the box-like nature this one demonstrated. The crest is centered, not aligned over the breast - this, to me, emphasizes the Tigers’ role as a civic beacon to their fans, and gives a special weight to the beautiful arrangement of navy logo on crisp white jersey. Behind the logo, a circular design element creates a halo around the crest, which is bisected both vertically and horizontally by two thin, silver-grey lines. The halo and line effect is an homage to the Detroit city flag, which has a similar design structure to it; this again gives the Tigers crest, and identity, extra social and civic significance. Below the crest, the year of the club’s founding is called out in gothic-style lettering - a nod to tradition - and the number is bracketed on each side by two stars, accounting for the four world championships the Tigers have brought home. The collar, bottom seam and sleeve ends are that same silver grey tone, to balance the white and to pay homage to those 1980s visiting jerseys that did have such a sense of potency to them. The v-neck collar style is also a callback to those tops, and works perfectly in a soccer context.

Below the crest, also in silver-grey, is the sponsor. I imagine that Detroit would have an auto sponsor; I think it’s a pretty safe bet that one of the three major automakers would be on the shirt. Of the three, the one most vocal about their ties to Detroit - and the one using those ties in dramatic, youth-oriented advertising - is Chrysler. Their “Imported from Detroit” campaign has been both clever and effective; beyond being a surprisingly good play on American expectations, it used a cunning combination of the new Chrysler badge and Detroit’s famous Joe Louis Fist sculpture to evoke that same pride and fighting spirit in the tone of its advertising. Chrysler has gone so far as to sell “Imported from Detroit” merchandise, with the fist-over-badge logo, to the public, and it donates the proceeds to local charitable causes. I think a partnership with the Tigers, and the use of this special logo on the club’s shirts, makes a ton of sense for all parties involved. One would think the chosen sponsor, Nike - who love both gritty, urban style and good charity - would fit right in with such an arrangement.

The last touch: on the right sleeve is the club’s enduring, old-school tiger badge, freed from the rounded seal he usually appears within. The Tigers have moved away from this mark recently, but there’s something so appealingly natural about it, I had to include it. I also wanted to get just a touch of orange into the jersey, to acknowledge what is an important color for the club; it’s almost impossible to find on the actual baseball home jersey, so I appreciated getting to use it here. (Quick aside: For a good time, check out some of the past “tiger” marks the team has used. I saw while researching Tigers logos that somebody had lovingly nicknamed this one the “I do cocaine!!!” tiger, which seems to fit; but there’s also the “sure, I’ll take another slice of pie” tiger, the “owner’s 6-year old son drew me” tiger and my favorite, the “aww, was it something I said?” tiger.) The jersey back has, predictably, the name and number in navy on white, and the M.L.B. logo up top; that’s it.

I hope this jersey could be something special for the team, and a way to connect the club even more closely to its fans and neighbors. I think it honors Detroit’s legacy, and points towards optimism as the city builds new traditions. And hey, the mix of novelty and tradition is what this project is all about.

And there you go, that’s your A.L. Central! Thanks for reading. If you have feedback, I’m listening on Twitter (using #soccercontext) or over on Reddit at /r/baseball. These jerseys are created purely for fun; I’ve had a bunch of requests to buy designs like these, and I wish I could sell them, but they include licensed MLB property, so as of right now I can’t. Soon, though, I’ll have some wearable designs you might enjoy purchasing if you like soccer aesthetics and clean design work like this. If you’d like details when they’re available,

follow me on Twitter (@m_willis), or
leave me your email address in the form at the very bottom of this page.

And drop any time by for more soccer and design discussion (as always, both in and out of context).

Friday Music

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:39:31 -0500

“My Number” by Foals. The track is sharp; the video pushes it over the edge. Ever feel that urgency to be out at a club show, any show? Where you throw a dart at the listings in the back of the street paper, show up at the door, get your hand stamped, and hope something good is happening inside? In a perfect world, this is the set you walk in on. Preferably a few songs before this one.

Soccer Out of Context: the NL West

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:39:00 -0500

Postcard:

Made the West Coast. Women, wine, baseball weather… might have to hang here for a bit. Send money and/or Cactus League schedule.

Best, — M.

With this week’s Soccer Out of Context piece, a nice arc to the project should begin to emerge. We started with the Red Sox and friends, indulging my favorite team (and as any good Bostonian will suffer from, a healthy amount of my east coast bias). We then switched leagues, moving on to the heartland and some of baseball’s oldest clubs in the N.L. Central, then kept carpetbagging out to the Pacific (via Texas) on our way to the American League’s wild collection of western teams. Now, we start the journey back. Today, the National League West gets a soccer makeover. Then it’ll be on to the A.L. Central and finally, the N.L. East, where - with the possibility of a special codicil or two - we’ll put a bow on this whole “Major League Teams get Soccer Jerseys” thing and consider what comes next.

As I’ve been creating these pieces, a bit of a template has emerged; I write a splashy first paragraph, and then use the second to introduce some new wrinkle to the project. No need today; the rules are the same, if you’ve been reading these, you know the drill. If this is your first S.O.O.C. piece, it might be helpful to start at the beginning with the A.L. East teams for some “out-of-context” context. So, no new rules, not much background; just five soccer looks for the interesting group of clubs (two American classics, two heady newcomers, and one fascinating amalgam of baseball influences) making up the National League West. Here we go:

Los Angeles Dodgers

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Let’s begin with one of the biggest identities in American sport - the crisp, clean, Chavez Ravine, Kirk Gibson made me disbelieve what I jes’ seen, L.A. Dodgers. I don’t have a strong personal connection to the Dodgers’ L.A. incarnation, but I imagine that, as an upstate New York kid who hated the Yankees and loved the Red Sox, the Brooklyn club would have at least pulled at my loyalties. My pop has regaled me with tales about the three-team era of New York baseball - including the time he lost his little brother, my uncle, at Ebbets Field. (My then 8-or-so year-old uncle ended up back outside the stadium on the nearby streets of Sullivan Place, realized his mistake, and befitting the boys’ Long Island upbringing, was able to talk - bribe? - his way back in to the game.)

The Brooklyn Dodgers have often felt to me like the Red Sox’ natural analogue in the National League; based on affection, passion, and oh-so-close futility, they seemed a better match to the Sox than the Cubs ever have (whose futility has historically been more of the “So, how many games back are we? You want a beer?” variety). Ebbets Field itself, such a landmark of its time, would be favorably compared to Fenway Park had it survived to meet its 100th birthday this year.

And yet the Dodgers did not hesitate to move on from their infamous ‘Bums’ characterization. They travelled west swiftly (the decision and mechanics happened over just a few months during the winter of 1957–58) and hit the ground running once they arrived. The club adapted to their new surroundings immediately, and evolved with conviction and confidence to keep pace with its new Californian surroundings. Winners of just one (remarkable) World Series towards the end of their time in Brooklyn, the Dodgers touched down in L.A. and promptly won three more championships in their first eight seasons as a west coast team. That they did so with the same nickname, same colors, and almost exactly the same uniforms belied their transformation into a assertive, victorious identity. The Dodgers represent a very particularly American story - feeling overshadowed and worn back east, they left behind loved ones to find prosperity in the promised land - California - and did. Ultimately, they decided it was a good place to be from; now you can’t tell the Dodgers from natives. They may not wear it on their sleeves (not often, anyway), but if you compare the Dodgers’ rotund, friendly old Brooklyn ‘B’ to the crisp, freeway-straight lines that form an ‘LA’ intersection on the club’s current cap, you’ll have all the emotional knowledge you need to reconstruct the Dodgers’ story.

All along the way, their strong visual and cultural tradition has held the team in good stead. I wanted to a) honor the Dodger story with these jerseys, and b) keep that timeless identity sharp and simple, just as a classic baseball brand should be. So first, the color. This look emphasizes blue in all its glory. Though the Dodgers play in traditional home whites and road greys, if a club is name-checked in a well-understood phrase about color - like, say, Dodger Blue - it’s hard to bypass the opportunity to use it. Plus, this is soccer; color is king. (Quick aside: I’ve often argued that even the most notorious all-white-kitted teams - Real Madrid, Tottenham and England to name a few - present white as a primary color, instead of as a base or default color as is customary in baseball. It’s a subtle, but real, difference between the visual languages of soccer and baseball.)

So in a soccer context, the Dodgers are blue - and what a blue. Bright but conservative, it’s perfect for a flagship brand and evokes thoughts of Chelsea or Italy. But this treatment goes beyond blue; there’s more going on in the fabric itself, where Dodger history starts to play a role in the look. Two all-time great Dodger uniforms are hiding in the jersey’s textile design. First, the shirt has a slight shine to it; this references one of the most interesting sartorial ideas in baseball history (if not the most practical): satin jerseys for night games. The mid–40s Dodgers actually wore satin, head to toe, for some evening games to give their players an extra sheen under the lights. Allow me to quote a capsule from the auction of a game-worn satin Dodgers uniform:

It was believed that the reflective properties of the fabric made the garments easier to see under the lights. Night baseball was in its infancy in the early 1940s and it is understandable that teams would try to make adjustments to take into account the new conditions presented by playing games at night. Apparently, the benefits were not great or the style was not popular with the players, as the satin uniforms were retired following the 1944 season, never to return.

This is such a visual phenomenon, to me, that it has to be referenced in the Dodgers’ soccer look. Luckily, soccer shirts can support a bit more flair than baseball uniforms, so a judicious application of a satin-like shine is welcome here.

The other historic reference is also embedded in the jersey fabric itself. You’ll notice a subtle checkered pattern represented on the jersey’s surface; this is intended to signify a very slight “quilted” effect that the material would be woven with. This effect does a few things; first, it separates the jersey from other predominantly blue shirts one might encounter around the league, and lends it something visually distinctive without compromising the simplicity of the look. Second, it pays homage to another all-time classic Dodger uniform - that of the 1916 club who went to the World Series (and lost, to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox) in splendid checkered jerseys. Taking the pinstripe to the next (horizontal) level, the checker look never really caught on with the Dodgers or around baseball, but it remains an absolute touchstone for baseball visual identity.

So we’ve represented the Dodgers’ early history and peak Brooklyn years; the rest of the look is straight-up modern L.A. A confident, white L.A. logo sits above the breast; beneath it, six stars for the championships the club has won. Five L.A. championship stars, in white, surround one sentimental blue star in the center, for the clubs’ first, and lone Brooklyn-based, World Series victory in 1955. The manufacturer is Rawlings, a long-time baseball-friendly brand and a deserving partner for a classic identity like the Dodgers; the sponsor is Singapore Airlines, a premier air carrier, who operates a substantial US hub out of LAX to many points in East Asia. Much like Emirates or Air Asia, who sponsor big clubs in Europe, I believe at least one big American brand would gain a high-status corporate airline partner, and so the Dodgers are it.

The only other jersey details are pure white trim on the collar, sleeves, and shirt ends, name and number in white block, the M.L.B. logo - and one final touch: the inside back collar is trimmed in red, an homage to the simple splash of red on the front of the Dodgers’ uniforms that gives the jersey just the right amount of personality.

And with that, we have a soccer identity. These Dodger blues are an understated, affectionate homage to the team the Dodgers were, and have become.

Arizona Diamondbacks

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And now for something completely different. Unlike the Dodgers, the Diamondbacks have a very short history, very little visual consistency, and do not embody classic baseball Americana in their DNA. They are an expansion team playing in a huge desert stadium to fans that haven’t always clamored for baseball. There are a few notable Diamondbacks milestones, almost all occurring during the 2001 World Series when they proved that a) Mariano Rivera was not a cyborg, b) Rudy Giuliani couldn’t control sporting events with his magic “Police and Fireman” hat, and c) they won the whole damn thing when everyone in the country was paying attention. You can throw a decent amount of success in the N.L. West into the mix - they’ve won the division five times, a good haul for a team only 15 years old - but still, the D-Backs are a club just starting to build on-field traditions. And there are even fewer visual moments in Diamondbacks history worth remembering; the pinstriped, black, white, purple, teal and gold look they started with, for instance, is not showing up on Umbro’s Pinterest board any time soon. I mean, even Ryan Seacrest ain’t busier than that jersey, hey now! (Cue the ALF rimshot.)

The D-Backs debuted at an interesting moment in sports fashion. The 1990s were generally terrible times for new sports identities; even proud, classic brands (Pistons - though you could pick almost any NBA team during this era - Capitals, Angels) had trouble making it through unscathed, but new teams like Arizona never had a chance. By the late 90s, American sports design language was coming into the sad, post-grunge phase of its “corporate cartoon” movement (kicked off by minor league baseball, breaking mainstream with the San Jose Sharks and peaking with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim). And like any movement that starts with promise and ends with Nickleback, the last vestiges of the “exciting new sound” (one could say the opening bars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Sharks insignia; I’ll be a snob and offer Mudhoney wailing on “Here Comes Sickness” and the Chattanooga Lookouts logo) ends with imitators and opportunists hitching along, mixing in warmed-over, pandering influences in a desperate attempt to keep the ride alive. In the end, you get pastiche that nobody really believes in. In Arizona’s case, it was teal and black and purple - all once-fresh early 90s sports design staples - being smashed up with “traditional” pinstripes and 50s-style vests with colored undersleeves. Grunge meets the power ballad; teal meets pinstripe. (Yes, the late 90s had some issues.)

To their credit, and even though they won a famous World Series victory in that original look, the Diamondbacks have understood the need to change. And change they have - dropping all previous colors save black, adding sandy tan and burnt red tones, and mainstreaming their jersey templates. This has been positive for the team, and they by and large look good in this new visual world. But still, funkiness persists: they didn’t drop their questionable original logo - a snake howling inside an A, I guess - just repainted it when the new colors came in. The logo situation is made stranger by the fact that they have a serviceable and much cooler alternate logo that they use all the time - a better diamondback snake in a threatening ‘D’ posture - that could easily take over main duties. Right now the two logos have joint custody, and I know who I hope wins out. Also, the team deserves both credit and skepticism for using the popular ‘D-Backs’ abbreviation on the jerseys themselves; it’s weird, I’m not sure the team knows where its going, but ultimately I kind of like it. That’s a similar path to the one taken by the word “Sox”, after all. (Maybe the club should follow the example of their ’97 expansion sibling and drop their moniker’s troublesome first half altogether. I can see it now: the Arizona ’Bax.)

So that’s the Diamondbacks, visually - bizarre though circumstance, improved by reflection, and an insistence on quirkiness. I tried to use these traits, and designed with them in mind to create a soccer jersey that has a lot of visual verve - but within a structured template. The basics: first, it’s halved diagonally, with tan getting the upper portion and dark red the lower. Each color block has thin horizontal stripes just a slight bit darker than the base color - a classic fútbol style - that meet along the diagonal divide in an offset pattern. This ridge is my interpretation of the jagged “diamond” pattern the team uses when it can, expressed in the language of soccer design. I could have just put diamonds directly on the jersey, but Arizona’s are weird, and anyway I wanted to do something less literal here. The stripes fade back into the jersey as they stretch away from the intersection, leaving the impression of a wide sash. I’m hoping to evoke something reptilian in the way the shapes come together - it has the look of a snake’s spine, or something camouflaged on the desert floor. The patterns also pay homage to the American Southwest and its distinctive design language. The overall look has some playfulness to it, but it’s clean too; the colors pair well and are accented at the top end by a heritage white (for the team sponsor and, on the back, player name) and at the bottom with pure black for the club’s logo, collar and sleeve ends, and player number.

The logo is the ‘D’ version I enjoy, set by itself without a wordmark (as I think it could begin to acquire some meaningful weight as a wordless insignia if given the chance). Within the logo, seemingly protected by the diamondback, is a single black star for the club’s ’01 Series victory. Paired with the logo, the manufacturer’s mark, for Majestic (seeing as they make every M.L.B. jersey, it was time they got in on this thing), blends into the tan field. Above both, the black collar comes to fang-like points at the neck. For the club’s sponsor, I’ve selected U-Haul, who are headquartered in Phoenix and who certainly have business with a national sports-loving audience. Around back, the player name is in the heritage white, and the number (in the proprietary D-Backs font) is in black. The M.L.B. logo sits at the top.

This isn’t a run-of-the-mill design, but that’s not what the team would want. This is a jersey with distinction - and the Diamondbacks have the environment and the style (earned the hard way) to pull it off.

San Diego Padres

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You could talk about the Padres for days. This is a team with such a rich visual identity - one that’s never quite settled perfectly, but with so much potential - that it’s hard to know where to begin with a project like this. You could go back to the team’s M.L.B. debut, in 1969, or to their roots as a storied Pacific Coast League franchise dating to 1936. (That club actually formed decades earlier still, but moved up and down the coast before settling in San Diego.) You could tackle the team’s distinctive relationship with the color brown, or their willingness (along with the Astros, A’s and White Sox) to embrace visual insanity during the 1970s. And boy, are there are typefaces to discuss. There hasn’t been much major league on-field success - just two World Series appearances, and no wins; but two of the greatest pure hitters of all time have been associated with the Padres identity - in the modern era, Tony Gwynn wore brown pinstripes for the duration of his Hall of Fame career, and when the Padres played below the major league level, they were Ted Williams’ original club.

Let’s dive into the jersey as a way to look at the Padres’ history. The base color is a two-tone brown sand, in keeping with the team’s current color scheme; until a few years ago, they had been using this shade as an actual away jersey color, but have returned to the more traditional grey in recent seasons. I’m using it here because “sand” is still one of the teams’ main colors and still distinctively San Diego. The body panel is shaded lighter - verging on vintage off-white - but the arms, shoulders and collar stay rooted in deep tan sand color. And the clubs’ use of dark “sand”, really, is an echo of one of their core identity features: brown.

The Padres began in 1969 as the only team using brown in baseball; for many years after, they struggled to find a way to make it fit with whatever current design trend was happening on the major league landscape. They paired it with yellow; they pared it with orange and with navy. They used more, and then less of it. At some point during the mid–90s, they gave up and switched to a less interesting navy-and-orange combo, but brown couldn’t be denied. It crept back in, first as that sand-color, and then as a component to one of the Padres most successful, distinctive identity promotions: their use of military camouflage as a design element, to honor the large U.S. armed forces presence in San Diego. (The camo has been tones of brown and earthy grey, evolving with the military’s prevailing style.) Brown will always be hanging around the fringes of the club - unless they bring it back front and center one day (and for my money, that day isn’t too far off). This jersey’s use of brown tones pays homage to the club’s current and former uses of that color family.

Navy blue is the other primary color on the jersey, and it is a stark, fresh bolt in the middle of the lighter tan shades. The logo used here is the team’s official club mark - with their insignia inside a roundel - instead of the cap mark alone. This allows the seal to be surrounded by one of the jersey’s signature elements: a visual callback to the Padres famous bubbly font face of the 1970s and 80s. The Padres could introduce a thousand new ways to treat their name in type, and nothing will top their old, round treatment for distinctiveness. A few years ago, typefaces in this style were anathema to modern design, but trends have come back around in this direction, and if they treaded responsibly, I actually think the club could reintroduce this wordmark without kitsch as a part of a stronger Padres brand. Here, just the ‘P’ is presented in the darker sand tone as more of graphic component than a letter, purely to pay respect to a memorable piece of baseball design history.

There are several other distinctive touches that make this jersey special. First, the regular details - the players’ name is treated in two-tone sand, and the number in navy with sand outlines and the Padres’ current font face. The manufacturer is Mexican brand Atletica, who make uniforms for many prominent Latin American soccer clubs - and with their proximity to the border, I thought San Diego might benefit from cross-cultural partnership. The sponsor is Petco - whose name adorns the Padres’ stadium, both because I found it appropriate and because I couldn’t bring myself to use the McDonald’s arches.

Second, as mentioned above, the military plays a big role in San Diego life and in the team’s visual identity. The Padres wear full camo jerseys at times - at first they were one-off concepts, and with popularity and familiarity, the camo jersey has been elevated to an official “alternate” status. I decided to honor that role and its unique visual contribution with a permanent arm band, on the left sleeve. The band is tonally matched to the sand uniform color, and features the armed forces’ current “marine digital” style.

Third and most important is something I’m calling the “legacy band”, which is represented as sewn into the shirt’s bottom seam, and wraps about three-fifths of the way around. Most of the front seam is left plain, to keep the face of the jersey uncluttered, but the band starts at the jersey’s front left, transverses the back, and loops back around to the front right. What is the legacy band? Think of it as a visual timeline of San Diego Padres uniform history. Starting with their earliest incarnation, in 1936, and jumping to their major league incarnation in 1969, the Padres always existed in one form or another, and they have worn all manner of jerseys. I wanted to find a way to honor their previous identities - from colors they no longer associate with, like red, to styles they are unlikely to fully bring back, like brown and mustard yellow. San Diego has one of the richest visual traditions in baseball, and this band pays homage to it. Starting with the front left color panel, which is a muted charcoal to represent the club’s 1936 color scheme, each panel leaps forward in identity evolution - to black pinstripes (the uniform Ted Williams wore) in the late 30s and early 40s, then to red, white and blue in the 1950s, when the Padres won a few P.C.L. titles. About halfway across the jersey, brown and yellow-gold appear - this marks the debut of the major league club and its very distinctive scheme that takes the team from the late 60s through to the early 1980s. Brown pinstripes appear next, then orange (replacing yellow), then the switch in the 90s to navy, and finally incorporating gold, sand and deeper navy in the early 2000s (where the band wraps back around to the jersey front).

Why the legacy band? It’s important to give San Diego their due as a baseball city, with a heritage that stretches back nearly to the dead ball era and a direct lineage that continues through to this day. The Pacific Coast League, it’s easy to forget, was a viable third league in the 1950s: its teams bought, sold and traded for players with major league clubs, and for a time it was considered an “open” league by Major League Baseball - a status above that of Triple A. The adoption of air travel, and the subsequent arrival of the Giants and Dodgers to the west coast, spelled the end of the P.C.L.’s heyday, but for a moment there, it was very, very close to becoming a third Major League. The Padres won P.C.L. titles during this era, and are the only surviving link to it in the majors today. This history should be celebrated by the club, and could be in a simple, unobtrusive and absolutely unique manner with this design element.

The Padres have one of the best visual legacies in baseball, but you wouldn’t know it from their current identity. I hope this jersey relives some of that legacy for fans of the team and of baseball.

Colorado Rockies

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Not every new club has a chance to be timeless; the Rockies do. They play in a major market, Denver, where sports are king; when they launched, they had an entire United States timezone to themselves (and for half the year, they still do). Baseball fans in Denver waited decades for a team to put their hearts into, and since getting one they’ve lent fantastic support. On the field, the Rockies have mostly kept up their end of the bargain, fielding good teams and even throwing in exciting stuff like, oh, a “winning 21 of 22 down the stretch to make the World Series” now and again. The Rockies are not a flagship M.L.B. franchise yet, but they have the potential to be one.

The only thing about the Rockies - and they’re not in serious jeopardy at the moment, but like somebody with high cholesterol, they should be careful about how they conduct themselves - is that with their color scheme, there is every temptation to get gaudy. Purple, black, silver, mountains, big, bold letters, and a born-on date of 1993 - there is every chance the club’s identity could end up disastrously over-rendered. You just have to be extra-careful with purple; it’s beautiful, unique and if you overdo it by even a few percent, you invite disaster. And not even John Stockton’s family wants another “1996 Utah Jazz” situation. The key is to be conservative.

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this Rockies soccer-context look. The jersey is slightly faded off-white, befitting an identity that aspires to be timeless, and purple is used very, very carefully - but it’s so potent, it can’t help but have a large impact. The cut collar, and the interiors of the “CR” team mark (which is used here as the crest) get the honors on the front of the shirt - that’s it. There’s absolutely no mistaking what the club’s primary color is; the restraint actually helps emphasize the symbolic force behind the color.

I’ve tried to keep the entire Rockies jersey to those same standards of restraint and simplicity. Below the collar, a small v-neck is done in very mild grey, matching the sleeve ends and the Adidas logo. (If nothing else, I’d like this design to serve as an open letter to Adidas that they don’t need to weave the three stripes into absolutely everything they produce.) The already iconic, interlocked CR is the team’s crest, and serves the role quite nicely. Below, two final front-side elements: the sponsor, Coors (like Miller and Anheuser-Busch, it was almost preordained here) in a slightly deeper grey, and behind the sponsor mark, a three-peaked visual that suggests a set of mountains (or two sets, if you count the negative space below the grey design as a second set of white-capped peaks).

This mountain design element stresses Colorado’s unique home field advantage - elevation - and echoes the Rockies name and the mountain elements in its current club logo (and the very same mountains you can see from the right field stands at Coors Field). The mountain motif is more than decorative, too - it has a second symbolic meaning, with the three peaks representing the three important baseball identities to call Denver home through history. First the Bears (from the 50s until the mid–80s) and then the Zephyrs (until the Rockies formed) paved the way for major league ball; they are honored by the first two peaks. The third peak, touching the ‘CR’ crest, marks the Rockies. Around back, the motif repeats, this time covered by the player name and number (in purple, outlined in light grey), and the M.L.B. logo.

Throughout the design process for the Rockies, I tried to keep things as simple and elegant as the parameters of the project would allow - the better to give the team and its own personality a chance to grow into their identity. As a club that’s now twenty years old, the Rockies are right on the precipice between new and timeless. I hope this jersey would push them towards the latter.

San Francisco Giants

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I just spent a handful of paragraphs explaining why the Dodgers needed to express traditional consistency in their soccer look, the Diamondbacks boldness, the Padres legacy, and the Rockies simplicity. And now, the fun part. I’d like to explain how the San Francisco Giants need, at this moment in their history, to express one thing with their visual style: authority.

This is is the Giants’ time. They’ve won two of the last three World Series. Their stadium is on the very, very short list of perfect places in the world to watch a baseball game. Their city, by virtue of the tech industry, sets the agenda for modern society. (Did I mention that its got all the benefits of east coast urbanity, plus better weather, a less parochial populace, real burritos and that Sunday football starts at 10am? Anyway.)

What happens next for the Giants? They can’t ascend to become a top baseball identity; they already are one, and have been for decades. They could stress tradition - say, take player names off the jerseys like the Yanks and Sox do! - except they already do that, too. They could keep winning, and I’m sure they’re planning on it, but that’s nothing new. Where does the identity go?

My answer, expressed in this soccer style, and in the fashion of how a soccer club might think about this circumstance, is to get visibly stronger. To project power. To roll achievement into visual capital. This is a moment, rare in a sports organization’s existence, when the style in which one wears their success can redefine their permanent perception - and it’s a moment that will pass if it’s not taken advantage of. It is the right time for the Giants to be all black.

Black, in soccer, is part of the alchemy that transforms new success into permanent reputation. Clubs eager to be considered upper echelon, like Chelsea and Manchester City have turned to black uniforms as a way to tell the world that they weren’t going away after victorious moments. Perennial winners like Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona use black to enforce their dominant profile. Nations that have no historical connection to black - Mexico comes to mind in soccer, and also English rugby - have used black jerseys to send the message that they should not be ignored on big stages. Other nations, like Holland, have elevated black into a permanent part of their color scheme because of its potency. The common thread: wearing black is what a club does to send a message - if it has the cachet to do so.

Wonderfully, the Giants not only have that cachet, but they already rely on black as a part of their core identity. The use, in a soccer context, couldn’t be more natural. Let’s look at the details.

First, the black is all-encompassing - a flat, matte feel that almost seems to absorb light. (Just to clarify - I’m describing the jersey, but this also applies to Brian Wilson’s beard.) Not only would the matte style work well with the idea of projecting strength, and would set up a nice hypothetical contrast with the rival Dodgers and their satin-y shine. In this jersey, the Giants become a club to fear; they’re the Grim Reaper, calmly and methodically taking opponents down, or Darth Vader, force-choking the life out of lesser teams. (I know there are at least a few Giants/Raiders fans that would be excited about that.)

The details reinforce the simple black look, and give the other points of the Giants’ identity their due. Bright orange and white trim on the sleeves and collar highlight the team’s colors, and are buffered against the full black body by a secondary, deep coal color (in bands on sleeve trim, and around the entirety of the collar, dipping into a v-neck design). The manufacturer logo (Nike - this seemed like their style) and the sponsor, AT&T (who name the team’s stadium) are rendered in that same deep grey / coal color. On the breast, the famous ‘SF’ logo mark, and above it, seven stars - the first five are deep grey, representing the more historical championships won by the New York Giants. The sixth star is slightly lighter and larger, indicating the team’s quite recent 2010 World Series win; the final star is the largest and bright orange to indicate that the Giants are the current holders of baseball’s championship. On the jersey back, only the rich, orange number (no player names for the Giants), jersey trim and the M.L.B. logo disrupt the dark tones.

The Giants have a lot of power right now; other clubs need to present friendliness or tradition, but at this moment, the Giants need to intimidate their competition just a little bit. They have both the history and the current authority to wear black proudly; in a soccer context, this would be the moment to demonstrate that power by doing so. I hope this design, and the thought behind it, would work towards helping the club stay on top of the baseball world.

And that’s your N.L. West! Thanks for reading. If you have feedback, I’m listening on Twitter (using #soccercontext) or over on Reddit at /r/baseball. These jerseys are created purely for fun; I’ve had a bunch of requests to buy designs like these, and I wish I could sell them, but they include licensed MLB property, so as of right now I can’t. Soon, though, I’ll have some wearable designs you might enjoy purchasing if you like soccer aesthetics and clean design work like this. If you’d like details when they’re available,

follow me on Twitter (@m_willis), or
leave me your email address in the form at the very bottom of this page.

And drop any time by for more soccer and design discussion (as always, both in and out of context).

Friday Music

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:30:00 -0500

“Truth” by Alexander. To listen to if you enjoy: The Beta Band, Wes Anderson, Ennio Morricone, The Avalanches. To avoid if you dislike: whistling, jangling, sixth-grade level saxophone. It appears this track was in a Breaking Bad episode - I’m one of those dummies who haven’t started that yet, but I’ll look forward to hearing this behind the scene it soundtracks.

Identity Sketches for the Texas Rangers

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 12:39:00 -0500

The Soccer Out of Context project has led me to some very interesting places. It will continue - with the NL West up next - but I want to take a moment to explore something that one of the recent designs brought up. This is a quick aside about the Texas Rangers, their visual identity, and a few design sketches that expand on the idea of what the Rangers could represent.

Author’s note: Though this piece isn’t really about soccer at all, it is connected to a recurring series on the soccer design aesthetic applied in other contexts like baseball. When you’re done here, feel free to read about soccer design and:
The A.L. East
The N.L. Central
The A.L. West
The N.L. West
The A.L. Central

For more, including how to purchase future design work from the author, follow @m_willis on Twitter or leave your email at the very bottom of this page. Thanks for reading!

During the S.O.O.C. project, I’ve been going through baseball, one five-team division at a time. I’m halfway through, 15 teams in, and the Rangers are, by far, the team that’s been the hardest to work with. I’m proud of the result - I think it’s a worthwhile translation of the team’s current look to the world of soccer identity - but I wanted the entire package to be better. I’m not trying to redesign teams as I work on the soccer jerseys, but in the Rangers’ case, I really, really wanted to. Because a) they don’t have a distinctive visual idenity to work with, and b) they don’t have an interesting visual history to draw from. The Rangers are just… Generic Baseball Team A. They’re the examples on page 22 of an equipment catalog, or that “we didn’t buy the rights to use the uniform” endorsement look. The Rangers’ identity is only a bit more visually and emotionally interesting than the unlicensed ‘American’ team in RBI Baseball.

Here is the club’s present day design language - the current Rangers wordmark, cap mark and logo:

Everything is flat and generic; nothing is inspiring or evocative. I don’t mean this as an insult to the club (or its fans, who are by all possible metrics, fantastic). But I don’t even think they know what they’re going for visually. There is no Texas Rangers style, no Texas Rangers vibe. If you say, “I can’t believe I’m actually pulling on the Yankees shirt / Celtics uniform / Bears jersey / Maple Leafs sweater for the first time” people know what you mean. You can’t say that about the Rangers.

And all this is kind of a travesty, because there is nothing bigger as a brand than Texas. Texas actually claims that about itself. How could something branded ‘Texas’ anything be generic? Especially when the Texas Rangers - a legendary, kick-ass special law enforcement unit - is the team’s namesake?

Suffice it to say, I would make some changes, and though I don’t have the time or bona-fides to really redesign the Rangers’ identity, I’ve worked up a couple of design sketches to illustrate what a modified Rangers identity could look like. I’ve only worked on this for a short time, so they may be a little rough, but: here’s a direction a Texas Rangers revamp could take. To start, a new wordmark:

Here’s what’s going on. First, the color scheme: the blue is a little richer - it’s on the aged, yellow side of the spectrum instead of the royal side. Next, the current team’s pure white becomes an off-white, or heritage white, color. And finally, the red gets deeper and more scarlet in color. The entire color scheme is slightly desaturated for a faded, vintage feel.

The mark itself has a few important qualities. The font is new. I’m using IFC Los Banditos to give the Rangers a bit more distinction than the semi-western, semi-baseball, mostly-autopilot font face they’re using now. Another decision, and this will carry through the rest of the identity - no outlines or strokes. In general, baseball (and other US sports with corporate identity design shops) are way too stroke happy - they’ve never met a logo or a wordmark that didn’t look better with at least one, preferably three, outlines. Sure, it makes the logo look ready for a beer cozy on a discount shelf in a Target somewhere, but timeless identities need more simplicity. Los Banditos has a ton more character than the current font face, and I wouldn’t want to stifle that anyway with layers of outlining.

(I am using a slight beveled effect to make the elements here stand out a bit; they could also easily be rendered as flattened or one-color graphics if need be.)

Two other choices - first, the ‘X’ in Texas is given a half-and-half red/white treatment, to mimic the red and white fields of the Texas flag. It’s simple and provocative, and since a wordmark like TEXAS has a certain amount of balance, with an odd amount of letters and a symmetrical, expressive X in the middle, it’s worth exploring how that X can be made to work for the identity.

The ‘Rangers’ mark is give a slight arc, to further enhance the “old time” aspect of the identity - and on either side of the word, there are flags - three on the left and three on the right, to represent, in total, the Six Flags over Texas motif that every school kid learns at some point. There is also a nice callback to the pennant flags that are an important baseball symbol. The flags are rendered in alternating off-white and red for a bit of pageantry, and to really enforce the slight usage of red in the identity (the idea is to save it for small touches that have a big design impact.)

Next, a proposed primary logo:

A simple breakdown: this mark would take over for the current T-and-ball logo, and serve as the Rangers’ primary club mark. It’s a simple idea, really: a version of the Texas Rangers Division badge - a circled silver star - sits behind a modified version of the drop-shadowed ‘T’ mark. A few important details: first, to me, the badge star is an absolute no-brainer, and should be the permanent identity for this club. It’s just waiting to be a huge success - not least given the fact that the synchronicity with the Cowboys in the market would be perfect. This mark is much different than the Cowboys’ star - it adds a circle, rounded sheriff’s points, and is rendered in different colors - but the visual concepts would line up, and that would be a win for local fans.

For the purposes of this identity revamp, silver becomes the final color in the Rangers’ scheme (with aged blue, vintage white, deep red being the others), and the badge would look fantastic rendered in it. Atop the badge, a version of the current Texas ‘T’ mark (done in the Los Banditos face) pops, aged white atop red. The final touch is a nod to Rangers history - something that’s not done enough with this club - with the founding year in simple lettering astride the mark. The entire piece is simple, tasteful, and much more to the heart of what the Texas Rangers could mean than anything the current mark does.

Next, a secondary logo:

The secondary mark repeats the design pattern of the primary: a large object (the state of Texas) in silver backs a simple white and red identifier on top. In this case, that identifier is a callback to the halved X from the wordmark - now the X sits squarely over the Dallas/Arlington/Ft. Worth area for a classic ‘X marks the spot’ identifier. This mark calls out the clubs’ locality, something that I wanted to do explicitly (as it’s not done in the name) while also strengthening the Rangers’ claim to the entirety of Texas. This mark would make a great sleeve patch or the like, and could even crop up more frequently…

Let’s talk caps. Most clubs have two nowadays; the Rangers would too. First, the primary cap: deep vintage blue, a red bill, and the Texas Rangers badge as a proud, “needs no explanation” wordmark. This would be the everyday cap. Next, the alternate: all blue, including the bill, and the halved X as the cap mark - which looks outstanding on a blue field - and which would begin to grow as a secondary Rangers identity. I have to say, I think these X caps in particular would become very, very popular.

The cool thing about a revamp that works with iconic pieces like this is that once you get it in place, you can really start to have fun with the components, and do a ton of great stuff with the identity that goes way beyond jerseys. For instance, the primary and secondary marks can split apart, and joined with some judicious rearrangement of the six flags from the original wordmark, you can get yourself something pretty fun:

(That pictograph very loosely spells out “TEXAS baseball”, and if you don’t see it even after this little explanation, maybe I’m being too clever here.) If it worked, this would be a designer’s and a marketer’s dream - an entire design language to play with and to brand different aspects of the club with. Merchandise, T-Shirts, Printed material: all in play. Elements could stand alone - like the flags or the silver state mark - or could be used together to evoke something very Texan or very fun (or both). They could be grouped and rearranged to constantly do new things with the identity. The bottom line is a flexible, modular personality that gives you flavors of Texas, History, Baseball as America’s Pastime, Vintage, Local, and Smart. To me, that’s a big improvement.

I can be confident in saying this: the current Rangers identity isn’t pulling off any of this. Rangers fans deserve an identity that gives them a team that speaks for itself - this is one attempt to envision one.

Note: the flag icon used as an element in this design exercise was sourced from the Noun Project, a wonderful resource for any designer.

If you made it this far, you might enjoy a few other uniform, design and identity-related pieces I’ve written: Soccer Out of Context, Re-booting the New England Revolution and What Makes a USA Soccer Kit?. I’m also tracking seasonal soccer tables, beautifully, at the Seasons project. If you like tech writing, I do a little of that too now and then. Thanks again!

Soccer Out of Context: the AL West

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:39:00 -0500

This piece, the third in the Soccer Out of Context series, gets us halfway around Major League Baseball. (Yup, that’s me, digging into second, looking to pick up the third base coach, and probably missing the frantic “hold up!” sign.) I’ll likely say this every time I publish one of these, but I’m thrilled to get to do this for an audience like those of you who have been dropping by - it’s really gratifying to get your reactions to these designs. Today we’ll be hopping over to the A.L. West - sometimes wild, sometimes mild, sometimes… uh, other stuff that rhymes with “wild”, the Western Division has always been visually interesting. Maybe it’s the history of big personalities; maybe, it’s a vestigial Napoleonic complex. I prefer to think that any time you get, say, a couple hombres from Texas, a dude from SoCal, a typical Bay Area guy, and somebody from the Pacific Northwest into a room together, you’re bound to see some interesting things go down.

Last time I linked to the original rules of the exercise, and then added one more, so I don’t see the harm in doing the same today - and it’s kind of an amendment this time. Before, I wrote: “I’m not changing logos, colors or visual properties - just trying to play within existing boundaries.” Allow me to re-state:

I’m not rebranding teams, but I am pulling from teams’ entire visual histories, not just their present day looks.

Or, I’m not going to sweat it if I dive into a team’s past for a better logo, or combine, re-use or update visual motifs that teams have connections to. I want each club to look its best in a soccer context - and that means some playing around. Some identities just translate more easily into the world of soccer; others need a bit of coaxing (or historical exploration) to bring out the “soccer” in their look and feel. But instead of trying to describe all this in mundane detail, let’s get to the visuals.

Oakland Athletics

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In my youth, it was the Bash Brothers, Rickey Henderson and four guys trying to win 20 games (so close, Storm Davis) or one guy flirting with winning 30 (nice split finger, Bob Welch). It was my beloved, average-to-good Red Sox teams of the late 80s and early 90s (aka, Clemens, Boggs, and a bunch of Cheers extras) getting absolutely smoked by Dave Stewart and the A’s machine in the playoffs. And it was style: head nods, bat flips, Oakleys. The freaking high-five wasn’t cool enough for the A’s; they had to invent something A’s cool (the forearm bash, which showed up in more than a few backyard whiffleball games during that era).

And the A’s extended that sense of style and inventiveness to the way they dressed, too: they favored long pants, showing very little stirrup or sock, white spikes (even on the road), and (in Rickey’s case) day-glo batting gloves. To a baseball-loving kid like me, every little detail was awesome. And that’s just my childhood frame of reference; the A’s were cool before the era I described, and they remained cool after. I mean, Brad Pitt starred in a movie about them last year. In the greater baseball ecosystem, the A’s have a pretty unique culture - flamboyant, fun, and ruthless. I wanted to give them a jersey that would honor all that (and, I don’t know, impress soccer-loving A’s GM Billy Beane and soccer-team-owning A’s owner Lew Wolff).

This piece of kit is what I came up with. First, it’s dominated by the all-enveloping Oakland forest green tone. There are no collar or sleeve accents; no piping or contrasting adornments. Just deep, rich green. The effect, to me, is one of intimidation. Even the Nike logo (and there is no doubt in my mind that the A’s are a Nike kind of club) fades back into the design. But since we’re talking about the A’s, some style has to shine through - and it does, in a few ways. First, the club crest. Instead of the team’s existing cap logo or team mark, I chose a historic symbol for the A’s crest: the mighty white elephant from the team’s earliest days (dating back to just after their formation in Philadelphia). The white elephant is crucial to A’s mythology - in fact, it might be the reason the team has always had that certain chip-on-their-shoulder exuberance. The legends (passed down through history to Wikipedia) state:

After New York Giants manager John McGraw told reporters that Philadelphia manufacturer Benjamin Shibe, who owned the controlling interest in the new team, had a “white elephant on his hands,” [A’s manager Connie] Mack defiantly adopted the white elephant as the team mascot, and presented McGraw with a stuffed toy elephant at the start of the 1905 World Series. … By 1909, the A’s were wearing an elephant logo on their sweaters, and in 1918 it turned up on the regular uniform jersey for the first time.

The A’s revel in giving it right back to you, basically. So the white elephant it is. (It doesn’t hurt that the elephant is also damn cool looking - and in a soccer sense, kind of reminiscent of Tottenham’s cockerel-on-football crest.) The stark white-on-green effect is also, as mentioned, something particularly Oakland.

At the base of the ball, nine stars make a semi-circular track around the crest. The A’s are no stranger to championships; if they get to 10, it may be time to dial back to one star, but for now, befitting their sense of style, all nine are on display. There’s one more quirk to the stars, too: they’re mostly gold over green, but three - the last three, save one - dip into the golden triple-stripe that cuts horizontally across the uniform’s chest. Those three stars and three stripes call back to another unforgettable era in A’s history - the 1970s - and the glamorous, technicolor teams that won a lot, and did so in their own bold, mustachioed style.

The triple stripe is a direct reference to the brightly decorated polyester uniforms the A’s wore during the 70s, when owner Charlie Finley wanted his to be the first team to take advantage of a newly-emerging technology: color television. In an era where most teams wore some kind of combination of white with dark accents, the A’s popped on-screen - and afros and facial hair didn’t exactly take away from the spectacle. The teams were great, too - and famously won three titles in a row in 1972, ‘73 and ‘74. If you take the stars in chronological order, the three in white over the gold stripe - championships six, seven, and eight - honor that rare and historic run of consecutive titles (and the final star, back over the green, represents the 1989 Bay/Earthquake Series victory, the A’s ninth and most recent). The three golden stripes themselves reference the design that capped the A’s sleeves during the 70s and epitomize their all-eyes-on-me fashion sense. Shimmery gold replaces flat yellow across this treatment, to elevate the look, keep pace with the deep green, and help bring the jersey into the world of modern soccer style.

A few other final details about this A’s look - first, the sponsor is Kaiser Permanente, a health care consortium, which is a relatively mundane but completely appropriate sponsor for the A’s. KP is headquartered in Oakland, has a large customer base in west coast media markets, has a relationship with A’s sister soccer club, the San Jose Earthquakes. Kaiser is also part of a group actively campaigning to help keep the A’s rooted in Oakland (though I admit that from thousands of miles away, the intricacies of the A’s stadium situation elude me, so I’m not sure how all fans feel about that).

Second, I couldn’t let the famous “A” cap insignia go missing, so you’ll notice it subtly pressed into the textured design of the fabric, running from the neck to the base of the jersey. It’s hard to recreate this effect two-dimensionally, but it would be a understated and very appropriate way to include one of the game’s most enduring marks. On the back, you’ll find the MLB logo, the player name treated in white, and the numbering done in the same gold used on the front, and accompanied by a simple white stroke.

One would hope that this jersey honors the club’s visual history, and is fit for a team with as much character, and as many characters, as the Oakland A’s.

(*FOREARM BASH*)

Seattle Mariners

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Update, 1/10: a few folks have pointed out that Nintendo, who owns the team, would likely prevent my original chosen corporate partner, Microsoft, from sponsoring the jersey. That is great feedback, and something I should have realized. I’ve updated the image and hey - I like it better now! Thanks, commenters.

This club, and its fans, deserve a ton of credit. First, they sit all alone up in the Pacific Northwest; soccer teams seem to flock to the region, but the Mariners - almost 700 miles from their nearest neighbor club - are all by their lonesome up in Seattle. Second, it rains a ton there, so the fact that baseball can flourish (due, first, to a dome, and now to a retractable roof) is still kind of amazing. Third, they lost a team once (the Pilots, after one teasingly short year of existence), and had to wait most of a decade to get it back. (We’re not talking basketball, but losing the Sonics was obviously not fun either.) Fourth, they’ve never won the World Series, despite having rosters that included two plausible “best players of all time”, and one plausible “best pitcher of all time”, near peak, at the same time (Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson), losing all those guys, and then immediately fielding a team that holds the record for most regular season wins in the baseball history (116 in 2001), but that still couldn’t pull off a title. And yet the fans are tenacious; Seattle fans have some kind of extra solidarity coursing through their veins. And if you’ve ever seen a Sounders home soccer crowd - 40,000+ strong and in full voice - you’ll understand that Seattle loves its traditional sports and its soccer at the same, intense level. There may be no market better suited to “get” a soccer version of a baseball identity. (No pressure.)

I’ve tried to honor that kind of environment with this treatment of the Mariners as a soccer identity. First, the crest: it’s the team’s current compass rose logo, in the now-traditional colors of deep blue, dark teal, and ocean grey. I simplified the logo mark just a touch, removing some exterior decoration, to prepare it for its role as a soccer crest. The compass is a great symbol - it’s universally recognized, memorable, and ties in perfectly with the city’s traditional relationship to the sea. Behind the crest, I’ve extended and reworked the compass rose motif into a jersey design; the eight traditional directions are represented in a faded re-creation of the compass’s points. All lines intersect beneath the crest to emphasize it and give the entire jersey an energetic jolt. One in point particular stands out - the vector pointing northwest - which is rendered in dramatic, full-color detail, paying homage to the region that the Seattle represents with pride.

I’m proud of this design because (like the kind of jersey and identity work I take inspiration from) there are different layers and different meanings playing together in a cohesive way. First, the compass directionals, extended from the crest, also form the general shape of a mariner’s steering wheel, which is an evocative symbol of the sea - and one that Seattle’s first team, the Pilots, actually used during their brief tenure. Second, having moved from crest to backing design, the motif is further continued on the surface of the jersey itself, where embedded in the fabric texture is a stylized map of the Puget Sound region that Seattle is situated in. The map effect is so subtle that it isn’t necessary to enjoy the jersey, but in context gives the design another level of signifigance for local supporters. Because of its inclusion in the fabric base, the map would be tonal - it would virtually disappear at some angles, appear at others, and really lend a unique (but soccer appropriate) aspect to the overall look. The compass rose crest, of course, is placed precisely above where the city of Seattle would appear on this map; but the full region represented is large enough (south to Tacoma, near the jersey’s bottom) to include many Mariners fans in the greater metro area that the team represents.

A few other details complete the look. The jersey in this example is made by Japanese brand Mizuno, which is a nod both the the large Asian presence in the city’s culture, and the fact that for years Japanese companies have taken an interest in the Mariners due mostly to the iconic success of Ichiro. (Ichiro’s name triggers another G.O.A.T. alert, by the way; what is it with the Mariners and best-ever players?) The sponsor here is Microsoft, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant who a) has tons of ties to local sports culture, and b) already puts their Xbox product logo on the Sounders’ jerseys. I chose Windows as the way Microsoft would express its sponsorship because it’s a flagship, national brand and, let’s face it, Windows 8 (a fine product, I’m sure) needs all the promotion it can muster. Update 1/10: While everything I mentioned about Windows is plausible, seeing as Nintendo corporation owns the team and Microsoft is a competitor, their sponsoring this jersey is not. I should have caught that! I’m changing the sponsor to Nintendo and their new Wii U gaming platform. Thanks to all for the very appropriate feedback. The jersey’s collar and bottom are trimmed in the team’s seafaring blue color, but the sleeve ends are checkered grey and green - a cool effect, and another callback to the nautical style I think the team could make more of. Around back, the number is treated in the team’s current typeface, which I only sort-of like, but I switched the name’s type treatment to a vertically extended gothic sans which better mimics the lettering in the club’s crest. The MLB logo, in its customary spot, is the finishing touch. The entire jersey is just a shade to the aged side of white, to enhance the well-worn, dignified textures and tones it would exhibit.

A jersey to be proud of, at the game, lost at sea, or sitting around with a cup of joe. Here’s hoping this is the look that would help push the deserving Mariners over the top.

Houston Astros

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The Astros - to me, anyway - are a worthy club with a slight visual identity problem. (Both Texas teams have visual identity quirks; but they’re quite different from one another - and anyway, we’ll get to the Rangers in a second.) The Astros deal with a somewhat confounding, very solvable dilemma: they’re stuck between visual personas. It really comes down to this: is the team a space-age, future-facing identity, or one rooted in the dusty Texas soil? Is the club more Apollo 11 or Ford F–150? More spaceman or cowboy? (perhaps Space Cowboy?) Do the Astros secretly still want to be the Colt .45s, or do they want to ride the psychedelic rainbow off into the firmament?

I blame the Astrodome. My theory is that the Astros would be fifty years into a single, classic identity if only the Astrodome hadn’t shown up at just the wrong time. An “8th Wonder of the World” here, some fake grass there, and all of a sudden a team that could have had an aspirational, elegant identity - something drawing from our nature to look to the stars and explore - became based around a then-futuristic, bubble-shaped building. Something potentially timeless became World’s Fair tacky and ultimately disposable.

And then the 70s happened, and everybody went insane anyway. But the Astros straight up lost their minds. They sobered up into the 90s, put the ‘Dome out to pasture and built themselves a downtown, down-home, sod-based ballpark. Along the way, the club’s identity became more conservative, and eventually, something kind of rootsy and Texan - but they also lost whatever connotations the “Astros” idea had in relation to space exploration. Today, they’re back to a pleasing 1960s template, but still devoid of anything excitingly different. When I see the star on the Astros’ current logo, I don’t think of space at all. I think of Heart-of-Texas charm, I guess. And so while the identity is nicer now, there’s nothing really “Astro” about it. I wanted to address that with this design.

To me, any thinking about the Astros’ identity should a) honor their roots, and Houston’s continuing role in spaceflight; b) avoid the kitschy Astrodome positioning, but be fun b) approach sophistication, and c) stress the club’s uniqueness. Luckily, the Astros have the perfect excuse to do all of this and more: they’re switching leagues! Like a nerdy, shy kid in his first week at college, they can take on a new identity and pretend they always had it. And of course, I have the added excuse that I’m creating a fully fictional soccer look for them anyway. So let’s discuss it.

First, the overall design stresses simplicity, a sense of space (both meanings) and fun. The predominant tone is a light, slate grey - traditionally, a U.S. baseball team’s away look - which I think is appropriate as the club enters the American League a bit of an outsider. It also suggests the sky at the edge of space, somewhere between bright daytime and darkness. I took some inspiration from the simple Colt .45s and Astros grey flannel jerseys of old, and especially enjoyed the unique combination of grey, navy blue and reddish orange that the club should completely take visual ownership of. Next, the crest: it’s the former iteration of Houston’s current H-over-star cap logo, as simple as can be, without bevels or extra adornments. The jersey is a canvas that surrounds and enhances the crest; the predominant feature is a vertical sash that terminates at the star. This sash - which is really a grouping of small, single-color stripes - serves a few purposes: it gives the grey jersey some bright dynamism, but it also allows the logo to take on a real ‘Astro’ identity, recalling a rocket at liftoff or a shooting star.

The sash also (not so subtly) references the Astros’ 70s “rainbow” palate in a staid, tongue-in-cheek way. There’s no doubt that the “so bad it’s awesome” quality the old 1970s-era shirts have continues to make them popular; I love them for the same reason many do - because they have a certain naive purity, and because being a fan is supposed to be a little over the top. The club brings them back when they can, but the idea of fully switching to the 70s look again is unthinkable - and at the very least would spoil the retro charm. Using the old color scheme in this soccer “sash” context, the Astros can acknowledge and play off their unique visual history in a tasteful way, without resorting to “turn back the clock” nights or other promotions to do so.

Other details include navy shirt and sleeve ends, and a navy collar with just a hint of orange piping at the top. Against the jersey base, a very subtle orbital design, reminiscent of the team’s “atomic Astrodome” logo, weaves through the fabric, crossing at the neck and base, and carrying over on to the sleeves and leading the eye from element to element. The shirt is, here, made by Umbro - and of all the manufacturer’s logos I’ve used so far, I was most nervous to add the famous double-diamond to anything, so I hope it’s worthy. In any event, the logo sits quietly in the background. The club’s sponsor is Shell, a Houston-headquartered energy company with a national brand, and their own iconic logo is centered and rendered in white, floating just above the vertical sash. On the jersey back, I used a simple block font face for names and numbers that introduces no extra complexity into the design language.

My inspiration for this jersey was the style behind Nasa’s early logo - one which they, too, rediscovered after a period of futurism. Like the Nasa mark, I believe that understated class and a real space-based Astro identity can go hand-in-hand, while still acknowledging the club’s design history and current positioning.

Anyhow: welcome to the league, boys.

Texas Rangers

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The Rangers are another great club with a slight visual identity issue. If the Astros can’t quite pick a specific, iconic visual identity, the Rangers have the exact opposite problem - they’ve never really had a defining one - and they’ve settled too easily for a somewhat nondescript identity. Luckily, the solution is well at hand. The Rangers have the potential to be an incredibly strong visual brand - they’ve got great fans, a successful on-field team, a good stadium, a big city and an evocative, meaningful team name. So what’s standing in the club’s way?

The Dallas Cowboys, to name a local neighbor, absolutely drip with personality and a identity. Whether or not the Cowboys’ dominance of the Dallas sports landscape suppresses other local identities, I don’t know, but I do know that the Rangers don’t seem to have much visual personality at all; they seem, in fact, to have an identity only by default. What the club needs is something unique, something they can own. And where the Astros have been busy trying on unique identities, the Rangers have had one waiting for them to take advantage of - their namesake, the legendary Texas Ranger Division of lawmen - that the club has never really done much with visually. Sure, the Rangers have changed fonts (at least the original “Rocky & Bullwinkle” typeface was interesting, but it’s pretty plain why that couldn’t continue), tweaked their logo, and tried colored jerseys, and then other colored jerseys, but really, they’re just shuffling the same couple of elements around every few years. Red, blue, white, a ‘T’ mark, some baseball-looking typefaces and a star. No matter how the team combines those elements, it ends up looking just “pretty good.” I wanted to take their soccer design a step beyond that. This jersey concept gives the Rangers a bolder, more focused look, while paying symbolic attention to the visual history that the club has built up over the years.

The jersey itself is deep blue, which I’d like the Rangers to take and run with. First, it will separate them from their new in-division rivals, the Astros, who have been known to use Ranger-esque red in their palette, but who never get close to this shade of blue. Second, I’ve never really known what the Rangers “primary” color is. Is it red? Blue? Maybe just white with colored accents? This jersey takes a stand and changes that. Here, the Rangers are deep, rich blue with white and red, respectively, playing key roles in supporting the blue color.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that there’s a pretty fine visual template for what a club called “Rangers” can be as a soccer identity - and though Rangers F.C. of Glasgow, Scotland currently toil in the lower Scottish league divisions, they are still quite a wonderful visual brand, and provide many good examples for the Texas club to emulate. Beyond those Glaswegian Rangers, there’s another great reason to use blue: the Texas state flag. This element, which the club already bases its colors on, should play a larger role in the visual identity of the team. And since the flag features a wide field of blue, and complimentary stripes in red and white, that’s what the jersey should do too. So beyond the blue jersey base, elements around this design pick up cues from the Texas state flag. Woven into the front of the sloping collar is a small decorative “bunting” element partitioned into red and white, and that element that is repeated around the rear of the jersey, in the center of the collar.

Beneath the collar lies the team crest, and again I’ve opted for something plain and iconic - the simple, current Texas ‘T’ mark in white, with a decorative drop-shadow in red. Behind the crest, you’ll notice the jersey base has a subtle vertical pattern that radiates out across the body of the shirt. This effect is used to call back several important Rangers references - the most crucial being the Texas Lone Star. The star in question may not be immediately discernible; it isn’t simply the solid five-pointed star you see on the Texas state flag; it’s patterned after the actual counter-charged nautical-style star that’s used on the Seal of the State of Texas and, most importantly, is on the seal of the Texas Ranger Division of the state’s law enforcement arm. In this treatment, the Rangers Star has been enlarged so that only its center fits onto the jersey’s front face, and that star’s center sits directly behind the ‘T’ crest. Centering this detail of the Texas Ranger star behind the crest (and above the heart) creates avery pleasing “beacon” effect in the jersey’s detailing, and lends a bit of extra personality to a plain blue field. (The vertical striping effect even calls back one almost-forgotten element from Rangers logos of the past - a subtle pinstripe behind several versions of the club’s logo.)

The jersey is made, in this example, by Russell Athletic (who have made plenty of baseball jerseys in their day) and sponsored by ExxonMobil, who are headquartered in Dallas. I’ve chosen the company’s Mobil brand to be featured, not least because with Mobil comes the attractive WingedPegasus mark that actually (in my opinion) adds some interesting flair to the jersey design. One minor detail - within the sponsor logo, the scored jersey marks angle upwards to create visual separation and to call out the Pegasus in flight. Around back, I’ve used a simplified version of the Rangers’ current font face (which is a bit too busy for a soccer jersey) and based both the name and number on a style that evokes the team’s ‘T’ logo. The effect is a nice visual cooperation between the front and the back of the jersey. The sleeves are finished, of course, in red and white - and one final touch: on the right sleeve, a pared down version of the Rangers’ old alternate logo, now rendered as a simple lawman’s star and banner, connect the team to their namesake one more time.

With this design, the Rangers can reclaim something unique and distinctive about their brand, while paying homage to both their baseball history, their region, and soccer’s unique visual language.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

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And finally, the Angels. Baseball’s perpetual sleeping giant. In my nearly twenty years of habitual web use, I’d guess I’ve scanned past at least three or four hundred sidebar links with phrases like “This Year, the Pennant Goes Through the Angels” and “Powerhouse: The Angels Reload” and “Wally Joyner: Will He Be the Best of All Time?” (Well, there was no real web when Wally was killing it in 1987, but I will consider that year’s Athlon Sports baseball preview edition an eligible precursor). My point being, the Angels are always predicted to be on the verge of turning into some kind of dominant monster, and they’re always pretty decent, but they’re rarely intimidating in the way that, say, the Yankees can be. And although they haven’t stopped stockpiling talent - signing pretty much every slugging position player that becomes available - I’m still not in awe of the Angels. The team’s identity seems too good-natured for that.

I’d like to see the Angels embrace that good nature in their visual identity, and it so happens that that approach can be expressed quite well by the contextual soccer design I’ve worked up. The club’s identity should be fully entwined with the easy living, warm weather, it’s-all-good west coast lifestyle. If their market rivals, the Dodgers, exude a sense of baseball royalty, the Angels’ identity should go the other way - they should evoke the feeling of a bunch of buddies hanging out on somebody’s back deck, or even tailgating before a game (or have L.A. sports fans forgotten how?). All the better if the team is winning, but a lifestyle-based identity like that can tide you through less successful years, too. (Just ask the Red Sox front office how they’re planning on marketing this season’s club - which will be lucky to get to .500 - after indulging in years of “we’re building a perpetual champion!” bluster.)

In any event, this soccer-oriented look for the Angels plays to those laid-back sensibilities. The shirt starts with a vintage off-white tone, and keeps the design and attributes very simple and clean. First, and most prominently, an open collar - in the clubs’ primary scarlet color - and a wide scoop neck lend the shirt a “lifestyle” quality, perfect for casual fan wear. The chest is given over to a California-inspired angled-stripe design; the upper band is divided into the Angels’ main colors (scarlet and navy), and the lower is rendered in a pale gold. Together, these panels form a sideways “Big A” and call back to the Angels’ long history in Anaheim.

The upper scarlet/navy band cuts across the chest to meet the Angels logo mark, now a soccer crest, which is asimple manifestation of the club’s notorious halo’d A. Though the Angels have vacillated between using gold and silver for the halo, to me there’s only one option that works with the sunny California style being evoked here, and that’s gold. Above the logo, a single gold star, for the Angels’ 2002 World Series victory, is present.

The upper bands also touch a second element - the manufacturer’s logo. I went out on a limb a little bit here, but to me the idea was too good not to try: I have K-Swiss making the Angels’ jerseys. It may not be practical, or even possible, but there is no brand (unless you count L.A. Gear, which, if you do, you’re either Karl Malone or a little bit messed up) that evokes Los Angeles more to me than K-Swiss. The company was founded in L.A., is still based there today, and has been delivering west coast inspired lifestyle garments for decades - I think I’d like to see them take a crack at this jersey. The K-Swiss logo looks brilliant in this design, in gold, and plays along with the off-white color perfectly.

The second, lower band, in gold, also bisects the jersey and wraps around to the back where, yes, it completes a “halo” around the body of the uniform. In the center of the front-facing goldband is the sponsor I’ve chosen, Toyota’s Scion division, which is a fit for a few reasons. First, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Orange County, and points surrounding that area have both a pure car culture, and tons and tons of young people in the Scion demographic. Second, Toyota just so happens to be making a push to younger buyers surrounding the Scion FR-S, a new performance model (which I have to say I’m a little bit obsessed with at the moment, though I will quite soon be sneaking out the back of the coveted 18–34 demo). This kind of brand and the kind of team identity I’m advocating for go hand in hand.

The rest of the look is clean and simple - gold sleeve-end and shirt-end accents, a bit of gold trim on the collar (another little halo callback) and the scoop neck, and around back, the aformentioned halo-band beneath the player number (in scarlet with a slight off-white buffer). Above the number is the player name, in standard block, and the MLB logo, as always. There is no reason to complicate this design any further - it’s perfect for a casual fan or an on-field athlete at once.

I suspect once the Angels embrace this laid-back look, they’d actually become kind of intimidating in the way that anyone who’s really comfortable with themselves can be. In any event, I know the jersey would fit nicely with the landscapes, venues, and people of Southern California.

So there’s the AL West- I hope it all made written and visual sense. Thanks for reading. If you have feedback, I’m listening on Twitter (using #soccercontext) or over on Reddit at /r/baseball. These jerseys are created purely for fun; I’ve had a bunch of requests to buy designs like these, and I wish I could sell them, but they include licensed MLB property, so as of right now I can’t. Soon, though, I’ll have some wearable designs you might enjoy purchasing if you like soccer aesthetics and clean design work like this. If you’d like details when they’re available,

follow me on Twitter (@m_willis), or
leave me your email address in the form at the very bottom of this page.

And drop any time by for more soccer and design discussion (as always, both in and out of context).