The Sports Aesthetic

Styling in the American sports world is for the most part bad. It's a hard thing to describe, but graphics & signage, and other aspects of the sporting aesthetic are so over-done and intense that it becomes flat out bad design. There is no subtlety to it at all, everything must beat you over the head with a big "Ra-Ra Go Team" and have an oversized dancing mascot scream a school chant. What this generally comes down to is that coaches and sports marketing is trying so hard to push the promotion of a game or a team that they just push as hard as they can, doing anything to get noticed, including sacrificing any subtlety and squashing any hope for a hint at fine design.

However, I was really impressed when I found this photo recently. It's a photo of the Marquette Basketball team from an unknown year (that's the legendary Al McGuire on the far right). These uniforms are great, the off center stripe and the bold-bold number is a circle; this is the hotness. Kudos Marquette for breaking the norms and taking chances with their uniforms. I believe that I will be designing a museum exhibit covering the history of the Marquette uniform soon (I'm told there's lots of history there) so I look forward to learning how this fantastic design came to fruition.