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CoSIDA Membership Recognition Week is Nov. 7-13
by Shawn Medeiros – Endicott College, Sports Information Director
CoSIDA New Media Committee, smedeiro@endicott.edu
Building a brand identity takes time, patience, and, obviously, a touch of creativity. Let’s take a look at two designers in the Athletic Communications / Sports Information world who do just that and what’s been effective for them via a Q&A format. The designers we are highlighting are
Gregor Walz (University of Puget Sound) and
Jon Holtz (Slippery Rock University).
Now that you have seen some of their designs and also their brand identities at work, let’s dive into a Q&A with both designers. First up, Gregor Walz.
Gregor Walz – University of Puget Sound, Director of Athletic Communications
CoSIDA: How did the brand identity process begin for you? Were you taking over a brand that had no identity, a bad identity and/or did you want to enhance what was already there?
WALZ: I grew up in the greater Boston area, lived in North Carolina and South Carolina after college, and went to grad school in Wisconsin. That said, I had never seen anything as remarkable as Mt. Rainier. I’ve been living in Tacoma, Washington for four years now, and I’m still in awe of Mt. Rainier. When I started at Puget Sound in June 2014, I wanted us to “own” Mt. Rainier. Early on, our game programs and graphics prominently featured Mt. Rainier. It did not go over too well. For one, I was still very green in the graphic design game – I cringe at the stuff I was publishing back then. But more importantly, coaches felt that Mt. Rainier, featured in prominent fashion, made us look like a cold-weather school. Well over half of our student body – including student-athletes – are from out of state. After my first year at Puget Sound, we phased out Mt. Rainier from being a big part of our look.
In addition to featuring Mt. Rainier when I first started here, we began to use wood as part of our visual identity. We are the Loggers, after all. This idea stuck – to an extent. Our website (
www.loggerathletics.com) features a wood pattern along both edges. I love it because it’s both unique and subtle. I spent a couple years incorporating a similar wood pattern in our graphics, but I never could get a feel for it. For whatever reason, working with a wood pattern was always a struggle and I was never satisfied with finished products. By the end of my third year at Puget Sound, I just about entirely ditched the wood pattern in our graphics (though it remains on our website, and will for the foreseeable future).
One of our nicknames is “The Maroon & White,” and it pains me that it took a few years for me to finally incorporate something so obvious into our visual branding. I think we took a big turn for the better when we started to make maroon and white more prominent in our visual identity – which came about entering my fourth year at Puget Sound.
CoSIDA: Telling YOUR school's story is so important, especially when a designer can add those elements into a brand identity. Tell us why this is so important.
WALZ: During a writing seminar my senior year of college, the professor assigned us to write a paper about an epiphany we’ve had in our lives. I’d never had an epiphany before, so I exaggerated an epiphany and wound up with a C+ for the assignment. Ten years later and I finally had my first epiphany. It was a Tuesday night May 2018, and I was laying on my couch scrolling through Twitter. I watched a quick video of Mark Majewski as part of some sort of panel discussion. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said “Boston College’s story isn’t Texas’ story and it’s not Michigan’s story and it’s not Penn State’s story. Sure, you can borrow certain design elements here and there, but each story is different.”
Immediately after watching that clip a whole bunch of different thoughts and ideas seemed to hit me all at once. I thought of Mark’s work at BC, where graphics feature maps from the T. I thought of Puget Sound’s struggling efforts to be a bigger part of the Tacoma community. I thought of coaches’ meetings I’d attended – listening to them discuss how Tacoma is a focal point in their recruiting pitch. I thought of the admissions meetings I’d attended – learning about new scholarships for students from Tacoma. I thought of my failed attempt at “owning” Mt. Rainier.
Tacoma has a population of 205,000, and it’s truly a scenic place. There’s downtown, the waterfront, old town, ferries, beaches, hiking … and Mt. Rainier. Those factors, combined with the proximity to Seattle (30 miles), Tacoma (we strongly feel) is the best location in the Northwest Conference.
In terms of wins and losses, Puget Sound is middle of the road. We have four conference titles in four years. Our history is all over the map. We’ve been NCAA D-III since 1999. Before that we were NAIA, NCAA D-II, NCAA D-III, and baseball was NCAA D-I for a couple of years. Puget Sound athletics started off Maroon & White, then switched to Green & Gold for 30+ years, and then back to Maroon & White.
Through all these changes, Tacoma as Puget Sound’s home has been the one constant. As Tacoma continues to grow (proximity to Seattle is forcing Tacoma to grow quickly), so too should Puget Sound athletics.
Tacoma is our story.
This coming school year, photos from all over Tacoma will be incorporated in our usual graphics (gameday, postgame, awards, countdowns etc.). But I don’t want it to come off as something random and half-hearted.
As such, we launched
#TeamTacoma on social media this summer. Periodically, we feature a student-athlete quote about what they like about Tacoma (ranging from it’s their hometown, to internship opportunities, to outdoor activities), and the quote is accompanied with a picture from around Tacoma. We will continue #TeamTacoma during the school year, which will expand to include our teams’ community service efforts.
CoSIDA: Why is consistency in messaging important, and how do you execute it.
WALZ: I worked in the Northeastern Athletic Department for one year, and I credit that staff for emphasizing consistency. I made it a point to bring a similar consistency to Puget Sound. I think the most important area to be consistent is your voice on social media. Are you using third person or first person? Pick one and stick with it. Is everything always awesome, or are you going to own the bad times (i.e. losses)? All of our social media posts end with
#LoggerUP. The consistent hashtag is not an effort to have it go viral, but rather it is a signature. “Logger Up” has been used here and there in Puget Sound’s history – the oldest “Logger Up” reference I’ve come across is in a baseball program from the late 1950s.
Graphics and images are ever-changing, so as your clothes, but your voice is your anchor. We don’t often win championships, but I think our consistent voice plays a big role in our social media success. Additionally, we’re consistent with what we post. We’ve created an expectation, and I think that’s why we do well on social media. For us small athletic departments, aesthetic graphics/images are just icing on the cake.
CoSIDA: Talk about selections of and color schemes. How is this vital to your brand and why?
WALZ: Since one of our nicknames is “The Maroon & White,” that is our prominent color scheme. We also use gray often, and sometimes black (maroon, white, gray, black all appear in our primary logo). Generally speaking, I don’t like the way maroon and black play together – so black is usually limited to just text. We primarily use our University’s official font – Univers. The thought there is two-fold. For one, I want us to have an element that makes us look as though we are working with / one with the university. Secondly, Univers offers 14 different styles. Whereas the University tends to opt for thin text, we tend to use the bolder options.
BONUS: What advice can offer about building brand and identity?
Take chances, be confident, and be flexible. Understand that some routes you take may not be the best route, but go at it with confidence and give it a chance. There’s nothing wrong in doubling back to try a new route.
Listen.
Listen to coaches, listen to student-athletes, listen to alumni, listen to parents, listen to professors, listen to university administrators, listen to community members. Go to meetings that don’t directly pertain to athletic communications. Go to meetings that don’t directly pertain to athletics. Just be a fly on the wall, take notes, and listen.
Jon Holtz – Slippery Rock University, Director of Athletic Communication
CoSIDA: How did the brand identity process begin for you? Were you taking over a brand that had no identity, a bad identity and/or did you want to enhance what was already there?
HOLTZ: I’m fortunate in that I work at a school with one of the “funniest names” in the country and for years the name alone has helped us stand out, so for me, the challenge really was just strengthening our brand and building a voice socially. When I first got here, we didn’t have any social media accounts. Now, we’ve got one of the highest followed social media presences in Division II. Now that we’ve built the foundation, we work to execute a brand identity plan each year that is consistent across all sports and platforms. We want people to be able to see something and know right away it’s our work, even if we don’t put our school name or logo on it.
CoSIDA: If you started your brand identity from scratch, what elements did you want to encompass in your new brand and why?
HOLTZ: First for us was creating a voice. We decided to leave the gimmicks alone. You won’t find many GIFs, jokes or taunting of opponents on our account. That’s not to say we don’t have any fun and you won’t find some occasionally, but we wanted our public identity and our brand to match the goals of our office, which are to produce high quality, accurate and timely information, always. We pride ourselves on producing content that stands out and we would prefer to let our content do the talking.
We stick to the basics for a lot of design and other elements we use to promote the brand. Our school colors are green and white. We occasionally mix in some gray and black, but you won’t find other colors in our work. We want people to see it and know right away that it’s Slippery Rock, so we stick to the school colors.
From there, we create a theme for the year. We usually create a couple different backgrounds and elements that we incorporate into all of our graphics, which we also use with our game program covers and other promotional materials so the same thematic elements are prevalent in everything people might see from our office.
CoSIDA: Telling YOUR school's story is so important, especially when a designer can add those elements into a brand identity. Tell us why this is so important.
HOLTZ: Every campus is unique and has something to showcase. I wish we were in a major city and could incorporate some cityscapes and city landmarks into our graphics work, but we’re in a small rural area where most of the landmarks wouldn’t exactly fit into the theme of what we’re trying to do. So, we don’t try to force it. We aren’t grabbing academic buildings and cramming them into the back of graphics. We take a more straightforward approach by building two full pages into each of our game programs to highlight what is happening at the university. We use one of those pages to tell the story of “how Slippery Rock got its name,” which is a unique and fun thing we can offer than many places can’t. We’ve also found that there is more value in keeping that content separate. We get great interaction just sending out images of campus throughout the year on our social channels to remind people “how lucky we are to call this place home.”
CoSIDA: Talk about consistency in messaging... why it's important, how to execute it.
HOLTZ: I talked about this a bit in talking about how we decided on our voice for our social channels. I think it’s crucial to decide what you want your messaging to be and to stick to it. You can’t create expectations or give your fans something to look forward to if you’re not consistent with what you’re delivering. The first step for us was deciding we were just going to stick primarily with accurate information about our programs and we were going to leave the gimmicks behind. Once we made that decision, we worked on creating content that met that goal. We don’t push content just to push content. We only push something if we think its meaningful and our fans will care about it.
CoSIDA: Talk about selections of and color schemes. How is this vital to your brand and why?
HOLTZ: I think this is the biggest area people struggle with when getting into design. Simple is ALWAYS better in the beginning. Stick to your school colors. You already have a brand with those colors. Why confuse people with choosing different colors for your content? And fonts… don’t get me started with fonts. I look at fonts in a couple different ways. The first is simple: it has to be legible. If you can’t read it or make it even some of the letters, why would you consider using it?
The next is that I prefer fonts that are legible on their own. I HATE putting strokes around text, so if a font isn’t strong enough on its own, I won’t use it. Obviously, we’ll incorporate some drop shadows and occasionally some small strokes, but nothing big.
The next thing we try to do is pick fonts that look good together. We won’t use a serif font next to a sans serif font. We won’t use a heavily italicized font next to a font that isn’t meant to be italicized.
Lastly, we limit the fonts. There’s no need for more than 2-3 fonts in most of the elements we create and we almost never consider using more than 3-4. We pick them when creating the initial elements and then we don’t change them. We stick to the fonts because they become part of the brand we’re trying to push. When you see a graphic we created, you know it’s from our office not just because of the players in it, but because the colors and the fonts are the same from project to project.