Going Stagg

Gayest Typo Ever/Joke

Today I was discussing my refereeing situation over Yahoo Messenger—my not having a phone situation made talking over IM necessary—with my boss. Now, this boss is not the boss of my school. This boss is Justin from my brother’s work. He’s the one who schedules my games for the Rice intramural sports program. (I’m a referee.) I just let let him know the deal–my phone’s dead, hit me up somewhere else–he replied with the gayest typo ever:

“Ok sweety”

“Sorry dude. Totally didn’t mean to put that y on the end there. That was the gayest typo I’ve ever written.”

You’re right, Justin. That was the gayest typo ever.

Also, a student told me a joke today. “Hey, I learned how to spell addition today. It’s A-D-D—Hey! I’m ADD.”

Thanks John.

Today is a National holiday

While I hate the Atlanta Braves, I love Major League Baseball. It’s one of the most storied sports, and even the people who aren’t particularly keen on it will sit through a game to drink some beers or enjoy some conversation. Either way, I look forward to Opening Day all year. One of the only other days that comes close is the first day of college football.

So tonight marks the first game of the year and a style note has to be made. The Braves played the Nationals for the inaugural game this year, and for the first time ever, the Braves unveiled their new navy road uniforms:

Now that’s how you take a classic uniform and make it new. They tried last year by wearing their reds (these are for home games, anyway):

Those navy-on-navy unis just look so good!

Two things, for the record:

• I hate the Braves. Yes, Kathleen, still.
• Here are their typical road greys

Rice University Intramural Sports marketing, part 3

This is the third and final part of a three-part series on the Intramural Sports marketing for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Part 3: The Final Product

We began this series with The Idea, before moving to The Execution: The raw product, the unedited photos, and the three poses we had to choose from. Here, we’ll explore the process that gets us to our final product.

So looking at the original image, I knew where we wanted to go with the shot: I wanted to make a tree line behind them, make some ominous clouds, and get rid of the extra distracting buildings. Later on, throw in some high contrast, and we’ll get a pretty sweet image at the end.

Here are the images we’re going to use. I took a picture of a tree line at Rice last year, and I went back and found it. We’ll use it for this shot:

I found this shot of clouds behind a mountain that we’ll throw behind the All Stars for the final product as well:

We’re going to get into those later. But first, a note: This is not designed to be a tutorial, per se; if it were, the steps would be a lot more detailed. Rather, it’s just intended to give an idea of the process behind creating the final product from the photos we had. Remember: This whole process started with an idea. If you know what you want before you begin the process, they whole thing will be much easier on you.

Continue reading Rice University Intramural Sports marketing, part 3…

David Beckham’s 100th Cap

English superstar and now Galaxy player David Beckham recently played his 100th game (called a ‘cap’) with England in a game against France which they won 1-0. The English team made a special uniform for the occasion that looks pretty sweet (click on the pic for full size):

How is this special? If you look closely, on his upper left shoulder, it says “100th Cap” in gold. Just above that it has the team match-up and the date the game was played. This is nothing completely new; FIFA was putting the name and date of every game played on every soccer ball in the last World Cup. However, what remains to be seen, is whether or not the entire team wore the gold lettered “100th Cap” or if it was just on Beckham’s jersey.

Despite the gold lettering, it appears that’s the only place where the gold and red make an appearance. This sucks. The gold and red English jerseys were the absolute best. (Plus, I think they should have toned down the “horns” across the upper chest. Either white or blue, not both.) Compare (please note: These are their road jerseys. Their home whites, as far as I know, never used gold as an element):

2008-2009

2007-2008

Regardless, I still think red is the best color for a professional sports team.

Update: Through the comments on Uni Watch’s site, apparently it was just for Beckham, most likely so he could frame the jersey later. Apparently, France’s William Gallas asked to swap jerseys at the end of the game and Beckham declined.

via Uni Watch

Rice University Intramural Sports marketing, part 2

This is the second of a three-part series on the Intramural Sports marketing for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Part 2: The Execution

We began this series with The Idea: The best of the best intramural sports players in a shot with the equipment from their sport. (If you missed The Idea post, you can check it out here.) The shoot went great: We provided them with IM Championship t-shirts (most of them had already won one, anyway), we had them wear grey shorts, and we had everyone but two of the original 11 selected that could make it.

After checking out all the shots (we’ll spare you), we had three general poses: The ‘V’, The Straight Line, The Stagger. Here are the best of three, one from each pose (make sure to click on the picture to see the full size):

Pose 1: The ‘V’

Pose 2: The Straight Line

Pose 3: The Stagger

After looking through them, Justin (Stafford, the Assistant Director for Intramural Sports) and I decided that the Stagger pose—a last minute decision suggested by Justin for a third pose—actually turned out to be the best. (I had taken a closer shot, but we opted for the one that’s a little bit further back so we could add text in later to complete the campaign.)

So we went with #3. (In part 3, we’ll take this image and show you what we did with it.) Here is a larger version:

Look tomorrow for the in-depth Part 3: How we take the original image and turn it into something badass.

Jump Right In

I feel like introductions are trite. I’m just going to go right ahead and let you know some things that happened to me at school.

• A kindergartener peed his pants today and was standing in the office looking really angry. I secretly hoped someone peed on him, but alas he did it himself. When he was asked why he was so angry he replied, “It’s the school’s fault! They won’t let me go to the restroom!”
• Me and some second graders were waiting in my classroom while pictures were being taken in the commons. One boy said, “Awww man! There are only two guys in here.” Then the quiet Mormon girl quietly stated, “I know. Plus there’s two black people.”
• A kid in eighth grade with really curly hair got his hair straightened.
• That same kid told the corny joke, “A fish swam into a wall and said, ‘Dam.’”
• The crazy music teacher from New Orleans threw a chicken wing bone into the hallway. It grossed out JW.
• Kids have a bad habit of answering the question, “Hey, what’s up man?” with the reply of, “Good.”

Rice University Intramural Sports marketing, part 1

Occasionally, I’m going to put some tutorial/before and after pieces from the work I do during the day. (After all, I am paid to do design.) This will be the first one of those for this blog, with hopefully more in the future. Here, a three-part series on how I’m going to do the marketing campaign for the Intramural Sports program at Rice University for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Part 1: The Idea

Today at 4 p.m. we’re having a photo shoot for the Intramural Sports program at Rice University for the summer and 2008-2009 marketing. We’re taking the best student athlete intramural participants from all the major sports (basketball, flag football, soccer, volleyball, and floor hockey) and putting them together in one major shot, each individual with a prop from their respective sport.

We were looking to do something similar to these, but with the Rice University flair (for all of the following, click on pic for bigger picture):

This was an ad done by Lumedia for Nike called “Draftroll”

Here’s one from Gatorade called “League of Clutch”:

Anyway, you can kind of see what the idea is. In the next part, I’ll show you the results of the photo shoot, and the intention on how we decide to design the final piece, bringing the whole thing together. In the third and final part, I’ll actually show you what we ended up with.

Part 2: The Execution coming soon. Part 3: The Final Product shortly thereafter.

Camel Lights’ new packaging

UPDATE (04/01/08): Great coverage of this over at Brand New.

My roommate smokes Camel Lights and he has been for awhile. It’s a pretty iconic package design, one that’s remained roughly the same for a long time. (Click the pic at left for an ad from the mid-’40s featuring Doris from Miracle on 34th Street.)

Either way, Camel went and redesigned the packaging, otherwise you probably wouldn’t have a post on here from me. The two versions, old and new, are below.

Continue reading Camel Lights’ new packaging…

An NCAA basketball warm-up moment

CBS showed the pre-game pep talk from George Mason coach Jim Larranaga (who happens to have a real hard time not showing his top row of teeth) right before they went up against Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA tournament. While it didn’t help (Mason lost 68-50), the team was wearing their warm-ups during the speech and I thought they were pretty sweet:

Also, East Carolina has some awesome ones as well, but I’m having a hard time finding a picture. As soon as I do I’ll post it up.

A.I. shows Phila love

On the subject of Philadelphia, I’ve also always loved the 76ers. It’s kinda like by default, since I was born there. It also has a lot to do with how awesome their old school jerseys are.

And for anyone that knows anything about Phila, Allen Iverson—basketball god— used to play for them before he got traded to Denver (equally as awesome uniforms these days, though it’s entirely possible I’m swayed by the compression shooting sleeve).

Yesterday actually marked the first day that AI played against his former teammates, the 76ers, and, showing what a great sport he is, had his shoes monogrammed to thank Philadelphia for all the years he spent there:

AI played ten seasons in Philadelphia after being the first overall draft pick in the 1996 NBA draft. Trivia (no Googling): Name three other players that went behind him in the same draft. *

Continue reading A.I. shows Phila love…