Avoiding the Sea of Sameness

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in August 2016. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

A recent conversation on Twitter sparked a passionate debate about the current state of design in the sports industry. In my opinion, and I think in the opinion of many in this niché of business and design, the last few years have been mundane when it comes to interesting work in sports. Sure the execution of work is typically on point. Great Photoshop. Nice typography and photography. But the ideas are what is lacking—the overall concept.

The culture of sport has always dealt with a "follow the leader" mentality when it comes to business, marketing and especially design. The programs that are winning are always on the main stage in terms of TV, print media and online articles; so it's impossible not to see their work.

I certainly understand that in some instances, specifically related to college sports design, there are SIDs, student interns and other non-designers creating work and they are only aware of a few places directly related to the sports business to look for inspiration. Those inspiration galleries are flooded each year with 100s of designs and what we're starting to see is that everything is beginning to look the same.

I remember back during my first job out of school (back in 2005 at IMG College), no one used staged photo shoots for things like schedule posters or other marketing collateral in college athletics. We all tended to use action shots taken from games. Eventually, some team decided to stage a photo shoot for their yearly marketing campaign and everyone quickly took doing so as well. You can have much more control over the image you can use for composition and layout when doing so.

Nowadays a popular shot, especially during football season, is the "screaming player with arms out". As you can see in the image above, these are a few samples I pulled from this year's poster campaign from a few teams. The images were randomly selected; though, as you can imagine, there are many more just like this. What makes these images different? Be objective. There isn't much. The supporting graphics and brand colors are really all that distinguish the art direction from another. The Illinois poster at the very least has a differing angle on the player which makes it unique in comparison to the others, but he "screaming player" is still there. Why do you think this is?

When we all (and yes I'm using "we" because we're all guilty, myself included as noted in 2015's EKU Football campaign) look at the same few places for inspiration, there is no question that we are going to be producing very similar work.

We need to break free from looking within the sports industry for inspiration in creating campaigns or other work for our sports organizations. There is certainly nothing wrong with viewing what the competition is up to in the numerous sports design galleries online (as they say, keep your friends close and your enemy's closer); but to truly push the envelope and do our duty as creatives, we should seek to inspiration in other industries such as fashion, music, technology, automotive.

Did you know that many Air Jordans are inspired by cars or aero-engineering? Long-time Air Jordan designer and Nike VP Tinker Hatfield rarely finds inspiration in sneakers when creating new ideas. Instead he looks to architecture and other areas.

I also heard once in a podcast that the design of Google Maps was even inspired by the veins in a leaf.

You never know when inspiration is going to strike, but we must be more deliberate about seeking it out. To not do so is to be lazy as a creative which can eventually lead to burnout or worse, being left behind in the industry we love so much.

Where are your favorite places to search for inspiration? Tweet or email them to me.

Best of luck to all of you working hard making last minute creative assets for the beginning of college football and the NFL. Have a great week.

Cheers,

Adam