Brian Gundell on sports branding and identity development

Brian Bosché:
Welcome back to the creativeBTS Podcast. I am so excited to welcome on Brian Gundell, Principal Creative Director of the Brian Gundell Graphic Design Company. Did I nail it?

Brian Gundell:
You nailed it.

Brian Bosché:
Perfect. Brian, welcome on, so happy to have you. And just want to kick off to talk about your background a little bit.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. And I appreciate the fact that you spelled Brian correctly.

Brian Bosché:
I know. The Brians of the Y are definitely our arch-nemesis-

Brian Gundell:
They are.

Brian Bosché:
... whenever they crop up.

Brian Gundell:
Man, people have no idea the I versus Y rivalry.

Brian Bosché:
You wouldn't have come on the podcast if it was a Y.

Brian Gundell:
Probably not. No.

Brian Bosché:
So we've established, this is the Brian podcast and we're aligned there.

Brian Gundell:
Yep. So just to give you my background. I'm a graphic designer by trade. I've been doing it for about 15 years now, professionally. And last 10 of those or 11 of those now I guess, man, how time flies, have been in sports. So I've worked for sports design agency down in Oklahoma called Old Hat Creative. I was a contract designer at Nike working on the football category on on-field uniform, designed for the NCAA and NFL. Worked for a little while as an in house designer for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Brian Gundell:
I actually worked up in your neck of the woods for Chris Peterson at the University of Washington football team for a year. And then moved back to Portland where home is, and started my own creative company five years ago. And since that time, I've worked with big apparel brands and worked at Adidas, Under Armour. I've worked with several major league baseball franchise, Miami Marlins, Atlanta Braves, San Francisco Giants, San Diego Padres, among others. And then NFL teams and leagues, MLB, MLB. Yeah, so that's kind of what I do on a day to day basis.

Brian Bosché:
So why sports? Very sports focus. What got you into this specific industry?

Brian Gundell:
I was a big sports fan growing up as a kid. I love sports. I've always loved sports. And what got me interested in design in general was just logos and uniforms of teams. So I used to just-

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I got my Sonics on for you.

Brian Gundell:
You know what's funny, what's funny, I lived in Oklahoma city for two years. I went to thunder games, so of the NBA franchises, I'm most closely associated to a Thunder fan. So no disrespect to the folks in Seattle on that. But anyway, yeah, I loved team logos and team uniforms and I would just draw my favorite team's logos over and over and over again. But it was never anything that I really did. I wasn't super into art. I didn't draw other than team logos. I didn't really take art classes. It's not something I was really interested in.

Brian Gundell:
But the sports team logo thing was such an interest of mine. I got from drawing my favorite team logos to making up teams and designing logos and uniforms for them. And it was my freshman year of college at the University of Oregon where I kind of had the light bulb moment where I was like, "Oh yeah, people get paid to do this. Don't pay? I could get paid to do it. Right?" So, that was kind of where the interest was.

Brian Gundell:
But I went much more focused on just traditional graphic design and branding and identity development as a particular focus. And it wasn't until I got hired at Old Hat Creative in 2009 that I really realized, I even knew that sports and design was a thing. Outside of sports branding and there were people that I followed who I've actually gotten to know over the years that I looked up to as kind of my heroes in the industry. But yeah, I just kind of lucked my way into sports design, and from there fell into the right place, right time to get into Nike. And then from there, everywhere else.

Brian Bosché:
Well, it sounds like when you have your own creative agency, when you're doing your work, you get a lot of your jobs from referrals. I'm sure that's very similar for you where they see your work in one area and want you to go on. Has that helped a lot where they see what you've done for one team, one organization, and they want to borrow it or they want to kind of take that skillset?

Brian Gundell:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Most of my businesses is referrals. I had a great boss at the Diamondbacks. His name is John Willie. He's now the COO of a company called better up in Madison, Wisconsin. And John ended up leaving the Diamondbacks to go to the Dolphins and got me some of my first freelance projects with the Dolphins. That's how I started working with them. And my work with John and his boss, Surf Melendez at Dolphins led me to getting work with the Marlins, which led me getting work with the Padres and so on and so forth. And those projects led to other projects and so on and so forth.

Brian Bosché:
Yup. And what's unique about branding for you? So you've done a lot of branding work for these different teams and you're pretty well known for that now as opposed to social graphics or other components of marketing creative, what draws you to the branding side?

Brian Gundell:
If you think about it, a team's logo, their crest, it's the thing that is the quickest identifier. It's what goes on all the merchandise. It's what fans rally around. It's what people are most passionate about. So I just love having my work beyond all of the-

Brian Bosché:
Everything.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. It's literally on everything. Like this is a bottle opener that-

Brian Bosché:
With your logo on it.

Brian Gundell:
... has a logo on it. Yeah. I love the fact that it's everywhere and it's what people associate most with the teams. Players come and go, uniforms change, logos change, but those logos in those uniforms are what people remember most, even more so than players to a certain extent.

Brian Bosché:
And you always have the throwbacks. Logos come and go, but they come back.

Brian Gundell:
Exactly, exactly.

Brian Bosché:
And the Grizzlies this year have been amazing to see the throwback to the Vancouver Grizzlies logo.

Brian Gundell:
For sure. Once you do that, that's part of the team's history. Like no one can ever take that away from you. So I will forever be able to say, "I designed a major league baseball team's identity," and that's the coolest thing ever.

Brian Bosché:
I thought you should have won that Watford competition.

Brian Gundell:
Oh, thanks man.

Brian Bosché:
So close. Those were incredible, getting into the premier league, it would have been pretty amazing.

Brian Gundell:
We were really hopeful. We were a naively optimistic, Marcus and I, Marcus Dilly, the designer I partnered with on that project. And he and I have had some really interesting follow up conversations with the club itself. So who knows, maybe once the pandemic's over and sports returns to normal, maybe we'll get our foot in the door.

Brian Bosché:
But you're right with like, it really grounds an entire fan base. So like you think about the premier league generations of fans. And you're the one who establishes what that brand and the logo, the feel is that they carry on. So yeah, it's pretty amazing. And one of my questions on the branding side is, you're designing what, I took notes here because on the Sun Belt Conference, but you're designing for print digital uniforms in retail experiences on TV screens.

Brian Bosché:
There are so many different components where a logo may work great on digital, but then when it's embroidered, it completely falls apart. So what are some of the unique components of having to brand for that entire suite of deliverables, as opposed to just a social graphic that's for a specific medium and channel?

Brian Gundell:
I think you just hit it. It's the fact that a logo has to work in all of those different situations and media. It can't work in digital, but not in embroidery. It can't work in embroidery, but not digital. There's so many different applications and you really did just rattle about all of them.

Brian Bosché:
Perfect.

Brian Gundell:
So it's got to be something that fans want to put on their t shirt, on their hats, on their bodies. People get tattoos of team logos.

Brian Bosché:
Jeez, it's got a wrap on your physical body in addition to anything.

Brian Gundell:
It's got to work as a tattoo, it's got to work teeny, teeny tiny, it's got to work as a social avatar. There's so many different places that that mark is going to live that you have to think about versus, yeah, social graphics it's up for a day and then it's onto the next one. And or even shorter than that, it's like a couple hours and then you're onto the next and it's usually informational in nature.

Brian Gundell:
And it's either trying to provide information or provide some sort of engagement of some sort, whereas a logo, yeah, it's got to be that quick hit impression, and has to do so much more.

Brian Bosché:
How does that change your approach to it? Because when you're thinking about a social media graphic, it's only intended for that one thing. So it's pretty tactical execute. How does that ... when you're going through these different projects, and you've done a ton of these now, and we'll dive specifically into the Sun Belt Conference rebrand, which I'm really excited about. But just in general, when you're approaching a branding project with a rebrand, a logo, does that change how you approach it versus maybe something more tactical? What are the differences there?

Brian Gundell:
Absolutely, it changes how you approach things. There's also a lot more that gets invested into a logo. Whether you want it to or not, fans are invested in the identity. So there's got to be a lot more consideration. There's a lot more research that goes into it. So conceptually, there's a lot more on the front end that has to happen behind the scenes. With a social graphic it's, "Here's what we want to do with it." You just make it happen and you can kind of make it up as you go. And that's not to say that the people who do social media graphics or marketing graphics aren't insanely talented and-

Brian Bosché:
No, yeah, totally different.

Brian Gundell:
... really good at what they do and they craft it and they think, and the concept and they develop it. It's just one of those things where a lot can change more quickly in that environment. Whereas logo, you really have to think about the end product while you're designing it upfront. And all of those different considerations really kind of fix how you approach every ... you know designing color at start. At least I don't.

Brian Gundell:
Color is like the last thing you do. Because it's really easy to change colors so much as an illustrator, but getting those forms right and down are really difficult. So the concept is a lot more important because you want to be able to have a story to tell, to have your fans latch onto and hopefully that they like, that they want to buy merch, that they want to buy tickets, that they want to go see and be participatory in that.

Brian Gundell:
And then once you get that down, then you got to make sure everything is just flawless in the execution. So there's a ton of refinement that goes down. It's just a lot more intense of a process.

Brian Bosché:
Well, hearing you talk about it, it sounds like you're like launching a company. It's not just launching a, when I thought about how we launched Slope, you're building the entire ... you're doing research, you're investigating with your target market. How will they use it? Where do they want to use it? What value can you provide? How are you differentiated? You're kind of going through almost a business plan, but I don't think people realize how much of that work goes behind what ends up maybe just being a logo on their hat.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's you got to look at the competition whether it's a ... and team brands are a little bit easier because there's a little bit more of a set criteria for how it's going to get applied. You know it's going to be on the stadium, you know it's going to be on the uniform, you know it's going to be on merchandise, you know it's going to be on social.

Brian Gundell:
So you can kind of preplan a little bit especially the more you do with it, the more familiar you get. But yeah, you want to look at the competition, see what your rivals are doing. You might have a team name that's the same as like 16 other teams out there. I can't tell you how many teams are the painters, the tigers, and the wild cats. How many ways can you draw a tiger? Okay. Now you've got to search through all that. Then you've got to look at all the concepts that are out there.

Brian Gundell:
You got to look through all the fan art. You got to look through all the non-sports versions to make sure that you're doing something unique because passing USPTO and getting trademark clearance is another consideration that you have with brands and identity. Because you want to protect that trademark, you want to own that trademark. You want to be able to license it and profit off that trademark for merchandise.

Brian Gundell:
So that's another component of it. So the research element is huge just in terms of making sure that what you're creating is unique in the marketplace first and foremost, and then all the background, all that, the historical references are super important. Again, for a sports team when you're doing a rebrand more so than a new franchise, you've got to look at the history of the franchise and really keep that in ... at least for me, I always like to keep the history of the franchise in mind because those fans are experts in the history of the franchise. And they're very, very sensitive to those things changing.

Brian Gundell:
So you definitely want to keep that in mind as you're designing. And if you do depart from that in a major way, you want to have a good reason for it. Similarly for bringing something back from the past in any way, you want to have a good reason for that. So, that research is another huge component of it. And then if you're doing something that's a little bit more abstract of a concept, you want to have historical and thematic research to go with it to be able to, again, have that storytelling component to it, to be able to say, "This is why this looks the way it looks, and why you should embrace and love it and buy the crap out of it."

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's a great overview, but let's dive into the Sun Belt Conference. Let's get a little bit more into the specifics for a specific case study. So Creative BTS Podcast, well, let's go behind the scenes on these specific campaigns or projects. So give us the quick pitch of why Sun Belt wanting to go through this rebrand and kind of bringing you into that process before we kind of go into the nitty gritty.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah, so they got a new commissioner not too long ago, a guy by the name of Keith Gill. And Keith Gill was kind of looking at the conference as a whole and kind of their place in the Football Bowl Subdivision landscape.

Brian Bosché:
Well, first of all, what is the Sun Belt Conference? Maybe we should start there for people not as familiar with it.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. So, Sun Belt Conference is a collegiate athletic conference. They play in the Football Bowl Subdivision, which is now the top tier division of collegiate athletics. And particularly in football, they have 12 member institutions which include Appalachian State, Arkansas State, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, Coastal Carolina, Georgia State, Georgia Southern, Louisiana Lafayette, Louisiana Monroe, South Alabama, Texas State, Texas in Arlington, and Troy hopefully I'm not forgetting any of the 12-

Brian Bosché:
Impressive.

Brian Gundell:
... core member institutions there. But so those, that's kind of the conference overview. They are considered part of the group of five conferences in the FBS. So there's the Power Five conferences, which are Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, SEC, and Pac-12. Those are all the big time collegiate athletic conferences here, Oregon, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Florida State, Miami, Michigan, Ohio State, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. With apologies to anybody whose school I didn't mention.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I don't think you'll get a lot of backlash, this podcast isn't that big yet. We'll see though.

Brian Gundell:
You never know. People are very, very [crosstalk 00:16:55] about their schools, which all power to those people. The group of five is the Mountain West, the Conference USA, the American Athletic Conference, the Mid America Conference, and the Sun Belt. So Sun Belt is kind of that ... it's not really fair to call them a second tier of the FBS, but that's for all intents and purposes, that's what it is.

Brian Gundell:
Smaller schools with less prominence in terms of funding and athletic success over the years. That's not to say that there haven't been big time success stories in those conferences, Boise State being one of them, TCU formerly before they jumped to the Big 12. So, they've got some giant colors. Appalachian State is a known for-

Brian Bosché:
Over performs, yeah, all the time.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah, absolutely. So they're kind of a big feather in Sun Belt's cap, so that's kind of what the conference is. So, getting back to your question, why it came about.

Brian Bosché:
They brought in the commissioner.

Brian Gundell:
New commissioner and as he was kind of assessing the visual landscape of the conference and kind of how it fit within the rest of the college FBS landscape, he was kind of noticing that particularly in on-field and on uniform applications, the branding wasn't particularly strong as far as he was concerned. He saw that especially on a uniform, when you're looking at the teams playing on TV, it was really hard to make out the Sun Belt logo.

Brian Gundell:
And then if you removed the text to increase the size of the former icon, just kind of a, I call it the pinwheel, they call it the disc. But that pinwheel mark wasn't really anything super identifiable, wasn't super recognizable. So he felt that having a strong mark that kind of aligned with the rest of the FBF landscape made more sense to basically raise the profile of the conference particularly when they were on TV.

Brian Bosché:
Great. And how did you get pulled into it? How do you win this job? It's like a dream job for most creative agencies. I fought for a ton of these.

Brian Gundell:
They came to me.

Brian Bosché:
That's amazing.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. So their associate athletic director or assistant commissioner, I think is his title for content creative, reached out to me. And he was asking me about developing custom typeface for the conference. And that led to a larger discussion about how, "Well, our commissioner is really kind of not super thrilled with how our logo is because of the visibility issues particularly on TV. And so, is that something that you could develop for us?" And I of course said yes.

Brian Gundell:
And so I put a proposal together. I gave them several different options in terms of packages, maintaining, keeping that desk as well as completely overhauling it. And then some add ons on top of that. They said, yes.

Brian Bosché:
They went for it.

Brian Gundell:
They went for it.

Brian Bosché:
To help us because I'm not familiar with how colleges structure these things. Is it the Sun Belt has their own creative team, internally marketing creative team? How much are they consulting with the rest of the teams for rebrand? How does that relationship work between the conference and the actual colleges or the universities?

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. My main contact is really their only creative person on staff. But he does handle a lot of the sports information duties as well as some of the creative stuff from the conference itself. They do have their own marketing people and PR people. But to the second part of your question, most of the back and forth that happened was between me and the conference.

Brian Gundell:
And then the conference kind of presented it to the athletic directors and CEOs of all 12 member institutions and said, "Give us your feedback. We'd like your blessing on the creative because we want you guys to be excited and be on board, understanding why we're doing what we're doing. But at the end of the day, it's our call."

Brian Bosché:
Is that how that's really how it works? It's up to the Sun Belt who gets to make the final call?

Brian Gundell:
Pretty much. Yeah. And that's par for the course, the conferences is an independent entity that oversees and governs the member institutions. So they have the control particularly over their own brand, just as a member institution has the ability to control their own identity independent of the conference. But there was some inquiry and make sure that, yeah, we're not going to light torches and pitchforks.

Brian Bosché:
You want a good relationship still between all the different, that makes a lot of sense. And when they're looking at this, like new commissioner comes in wanting to rebrand, wanting to make it more recognizable, more modern, what are some other of the top goals of a rebrand like this? What are some of the outcomes that they're looking for when you're done with the project?

Brian Gundell:
Legibility is a big one, recognition and ease of use, flexibility in terms of application. So they had just two logos in their previous brand package. They had a primary and a secondary mark and neither one of them were particularly great in terms of application as far as they were concerned to be able to use them in a wide variety of applications.

Brian Gundell:
So that was another big consideration for us was to develop a flexible identity system for them with a range of marks that they could use depending on the situation and what they were trying to do. So that was a big factor for us.

Brian Bosché:
And what's the Sun Belt's brand? What are they known for? What do they try to push forward? You said they're kind of in the group of five. So it's like they're just trying to make a name for themselves more, just better brand.

Brian Gundell:
I think so. They're trying to just raise their prominence and be taken a little bit more seriously. They had a nickname for a long time as the Fun Belt. And they've changed institutions over the past few years, particularly when there was a huge level of conference realignments. Teams were swapping conferences left and right. So it kind of blew up the college landscape, the conference landscape, and kind of put it back together.

Brian Gundell:
So they became known as the Fun Belt because they had a lot of high scoring games. Wasn't real great quality. So they're kind of trying to change that perception of how the conference appears and they want to be taken more seriously as an athletic conference and have their members not be looked at as a joke. And not that they were looked at as a joke before, but just-

Brian Bosché:
But just pride, prestige.

Brian Gundell:
Absolutely. Yeah. They want to be the top tier group of five conferences and really be looked at in the same light as the FBS conferences or the Power Five conferences. Sorry.

Brian Bosché:
And I'm sure that helps with recruiting, revenue, that brand kind of powers a lot of those motions that these conferences go for from what I can imagine.

Brian Gundell:
It definitely helps. Yeah. It's a consideration for some recruits when it comes to what conference the team is playing in, who the opponents are going to be, from a recruiting standpoint, what their chances are to make it to the next level are going to be. So again, raising the prominence of the conference as a whole, hopefully will make them more visible on the recruiting scene and make that a more desirable location destination for top level athletes.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. All right. So walk us through your process. How do you approach something like this, if you just want to give us like the high level, and then we can dig into different components, but how do you take on a project like this?

Brian Gundell:
This one was a little bit different for me than a typical team brand. In that, there was a much more logistical, not as high level of a concept in terms of what I was trying to put into this. When you're dealing with the team brand, a lot of times, I do a ton of research, a ton of historical background. I really dive deep into the nicknames and the history of the franchise or the history of the town, if it's a new team and the location, because those are cues I really want to put into the DNA of the brand as ways for fans to go, "Okay, I recognize my city. I recognize my franchise, and its roots. So this is something I can really connect to." That's not a thing with a conference [crosstalk 00:25:38].

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. They're so many.

Brian Gundell:
So, this was really much more a, "Let's look at the college football landscape, let's look at what the common themes are for all of these different, particularly the Power Five conferences, what they're all doing in common, what's working with some, what's not working, and what can we take from those lessons and apply them to this?" So, the first part of the process was really just research.

Brian Gundell:
And this was a simpler, shorter research phase for me than typical, just because it's really easy, especially when being a college football fan and a college sports fan. I'm so familiar with these brands already.

Brian Bosché:
And do you work on the research with the creative contact at Sun Belt, or is this kind of isolation on your own?

Brian Gundell:
It's kind of more of my own. I will do my own research and I'll kind of present it to them. And then if they have anything to add to it, they'll provide it. And it was really pretty straightforward with one, it's we looked at all those different college logos, and it's like, they're all really typed driven. They're all pretty rectangular and proportion so that they can fit right on a collar on a jersey, and they all feature abbreviations to have that shorter, larger brand presence to be able to be seen easily and clearly on TV and at a distance.

Brian Bosché:
And when you're going through the, this one specifically, but maybe others, do you bring in research firms? Do you bring in other contacts? How much do you bring in other people? Just you?

Brian Gundell:
Just me. Just me.

Brian Bosché:
That's very efficient. That's a team's dream. Bringing the costs down, don't have to bring in a big consulting firm to do a three month research project.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah, the research is as much for me as it is for anything else. Because I'm the one that's going to be executing the ideas. So for me to be able to kind of go in and find these little nuggets of information to be ... it's one thing that gets me excited if I find these little pieces. I did a rebrand for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds a few years ago and I took a trip out to Pittsburgh and I walked around the city and I found all these really cool things.

Brian Gundell:
I went to the Heights History Museum and I saw this like bus trolley train thing. And I was like, "Oh, this is really cool." And on the front of the bus, I had this great Pittsburgh word mark, and it had some really cool quirks and characteristics of it that I hadn't seen that I incorporated into the actual topography for the logo.

Brian Bosché:
That's amazing.

Brian Gundell:
So, those kinds of things are fun for me to be able to find.

Brian Bosché:
Well, I think people don't realize, a lot of graphic designers, at least from the marketing side, it's like, "Okay, just execute on this deliverable." Where marketing is the strategy, you're just the execution person. That's such a strong attribute or skillset to take on when you're a graphic designer, any creative professional to have the strategy, the research, and being able to do that all yourself.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It's something that is a strong point for me. And so far, it's worked out well.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Especially with your background in sports where you can kind of bring that level of knowledge and knowing those characteristics. Okay. So you do the research phase, get through that. And then do you present the research to the Sun Belt or do you just use that in the designs or different pitches that you presented to them?

Brian Gundell:
Typically, I'll present the research as its own kind of a deck to the clients, but in this case, it wasn't really necessary. It was kind of just over a phone call, just kind of discuss my findings and say, "Hey, this is kind of what I saw. This is what makes sense. So this is kind of where I'm going to focus my concepting." And they said, "Yup. Makes sense. Go for it."

Brian Bosché:
Good client.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. Yeah. So from there was sketches and concept development, and again, because it was really a type project, it was a topography exercise first and foremost, we developed the typeface first. That was the kind of the first phase, which again is a little atypical for me in terms of doing something along these lines. So we did a custom typeface that was kind of a big component of this. More and more brands are looking to custom typography as another way to extend ownership over their brand and their visual identity.

Brian Gundell:
Which I think is super cool. And it's something that I really enjoy doing. But where the Sun Belt was concerned, what I didn't want to have happened was I didn't want to develop a set of icons and then have the ... will be like, "This icon and this lockup treatment. But we like these three type faces. So can we see ..." I didn't want to do the endless mixing and matching thing. So, for me, I discussed this with them ahead of time was like, "Hey, let's nail down the type. Let's get the type figured out. And it's one less thing we have to kind of go back and forth on when we get into the actual design development."

Brian Gundell:
And that turned out to be a smart idea, because we went through a lot of different types of options just in type options. And once we kind of settled on kind of the main look, then it was like, "What if we round off this corner, but not that corner, what if we did stir ups? And what if we did which serves, what if we rounded the wedge serves?" So there was a lot of like, we got the main look down and then it was those fine details that we kind of went through. So, I'm really glad that we did it that way.

Brian Bosché:
So is that a best practice you've seen? Because I've seen the mix and match problem where you're just endless combinations. You never get to a final decision. Would you recommend starting with one component and building off of that, or is that atypical?

Brian Gundell:
That's atypical I think. I actually kind of, one of the things I do is I tell my clients, "Yeah, let's mix and match," because everything is so different. Every project is so different. If the type is not a really important component, it's not critical to the brand, then, yeah, trying different type options as you get down the road is fine. If it's a super critical component, yeah, you might want to nail it down first like we did with Sun Belt. It just depends on what you're doing. So sometimes the mix and match thing can yield some interesting results.

Brian Bosché:
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So you're presenting these concepts, take me through your tech stack a little bit. So you're your own agency. Do you have kind of the software tools that and love and typically work with clients? Do you have to use what the clients use? What's your process look like on the side? You're holding up. This is audio. Is the audio description holding up a notebook.

Brian Gundell:
Good old notebook, pencil, and paper. Yeah. I have used client's project management software tools when they asked me to, but for the most part, email and me taking notes.

Brian Bosché:
It's a little bit easier when it's just you, not having to coordinate a large scale team or anything.

Brian Gundell:
Right. For sure. And when I do work with teams on more of the marketing kind of stuff, there is more of that plugged into their system kind of a thing, their parchment. So I have done that with teams. I didn't in this particular case because it wasn't necessarily.

Brian Bosché:
So you send the sketches though first without a phone call. Do you have the phone call and then go through the sketches live? What have you seen works well when you kind of present these first things to a client?

Brian Gundell:
I have had it happen both ways. It just depends on client's preferred way of doing things. I prefer to send the sketches and then go through them live over the phone or via Skype or ideally in person, but that's rare, particularly now. But yeah, I like to kind of explain kind of what they're looking in and kind of what I was thinking. I think it really colors the way that people view the work and kind of what they interpret. Also for me, I'm not the strongest drawer.

Brian Gundell:
So a lot of my sketches are really more just placement layout kind of things. And so, it's like I have a lot of arrows with scribbles next to them, so I kind of call them like, "Hey, could you actually read my handwriting on that?" So that's my preferred way of doing it, but that's not always something I can do. A lot of times, I deal with intermediaries where it's like, I have to explain to them my thoughts and then they'll tell their boss or the decision maker.

Brian Gundell:
And so there's a little bit of a telephone thing that happens from time to time. But again, when it comes to sketches, the stakes are a little lower at that point because it's just the first set of initial ideas. A lot of times clients go, "Okay, cool. These are great. Can't wait to see the computer records."

Brian Bosché:
The thing. Yeah.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. And it's like, "All right."

Brian Bosché:
So you get the sketches over to them and then you have to actually move on to the ... what's the next stage typically.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. So, I like to send sketches. I like to talk about sketches because they're a really good way to have those quick initial conversations on direction. Again, with Sun Belt, it was a little different because again, being so type driven, there wasn't a huge need for sketches because of the type was such an important and prominent component of the design. But in a typical process, sketches, we'll talk about the sketches, hopefully from what I can do, I can do a lot more sketches quickly.

Brian Gundell:
And we can kind of hone in on a few directions and eliminate some ideas early on to kind of just focus the project. From there, it's going into the computer and doing vector renderings in Adobe Illustrator. So from there, it's kind of redrawing the sketches in the computer and then doing little iterations kind of just like with the topography. Like if you have, I don't know, pick a mascot, you've got a dog, one version of the dog is smiling. One version of the dog is startling. One version of the dog, it doesn't have their mouth open at all.

Brian Gundell:
The different versions of the eye. If you look at Sky Dylan's rebrand for UC Santa Cruz, that is out publicly right now, you can see kind of the inner process of what he does with all the different, just facial expressions of the slug.

Brian Bosché:
The T slug, right?

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. The banana slug.

Brian Bosché:
The banana slug, yeah. My mom was an anteater. UCI.

Brian Gundell:
There you go. My uncle went to Irvine actually. But anyway-

Brian Bosché:
Nice. Those are fun mascots to play with.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. I love the UC system. But with that, it's the same body pose of the slug, but just different facial expressions. So those are what I call iterations. So you do a lot of different iterations on things. With the Sun Belt in particular, when I did the concept design for what eventually became the final logo, it was playing with the number of rays in the sun. And we did length, thickness of those rays, how they interacted with the notch in the center of the B to make that B more legible than others.

Brian Gundell:
We played with things like we want 12 rays for the 12 members. Well, that look really busy and that's not going to embroider. So do we do six to do, like, there are six members and if you flip the sun, then there's 12 and it's like, 12. Do we even care? No. So it was playing with all those different options on the computer. So once those all get done, we'll kind of pick ... I'll deliver another deck of all those different vector options.

Brian Gundell:
And from there, kind of another elimination process, like we're not interested in these, these, these, these, these, these, these, and these, and kind of whittle it down to anywhere from three to six designs. And those three to six designs, then what we'll do is kind of expand to see the rest of how those will translate on the brand. So doing word marks to compliment those additional lockups, how they'll look in each member institutions colors 'and then we did mock up applications.

Brian Gundell:
What's it going to look like on a football jersey, on a basketball Jersey, on a field, on a court? How's it going to look in stationary on the website and social, how's it going to look as a media backdrop? So for all of those three to six concepts, so that's kind of the next piece of the puzzle. And that's where a lot of things kind of really kind of come to light in terms of usage. And from a client perspective, that's really where they can see how this works as a living, breathing brand.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds like you're doing thousands of different individual deliverables across this process.

Brian Gundell:
Not quite that much, but-

Brian Bosché:
If you have six different looks and you have to put them on all those different places, and then you have to go through iteration after, the scale of this surprises me a little bit.

Brian Gundell:
It gets to be a little bit of boheme. That's why I try and narrow it down to like I'd say three to six, but really I try to limited it to three or four. And a lot of times, there's great mock-up tools that are out there that make the process really easy to be able to just change out vector smart objects that…

Brian Bosché:
Just chop it out. Yeah. That makes sense.

Brian Gundell:
But then there are other ones you got to make from scratch that are not so easy to swap in and out and I try to do as much as I can to make those look as realistic as possible. So I did one of that basketball court, there's one I did, it was a 3D mock up from sports templates, done that. And that was great and it worked really well, but they were like, "Yeah, we're not sure that they're really going to get it from the 3D mock ups."

Brian Gundell:
So I took a photo from UT Arlington and I literally went through every image in that photo and had to clone out every existing logo and put it back into the point of like reflections in the floor, up in the scoreboard. There was a live shot on the scoreboard in the arena. So everything I had done on the floor, I had to do again up on the scoreboard, but pixelate it because it's, yeah. Yeah. That one was definitely.

Brian Bosché:
That's rough.

Brian Gundell:
But worth it in the end because it really sold it to the ... I mean there was a conference flag up in the rafters, things that I'm scanning every section of this arena to see where a Sun Belt logo might exist. And 10 out of the 11 people who viewed this thing aren't going to notice.

Brian Bosché:
Yep. So how many deliverables do you end up with providing to the client?

Brian Gundell:
Like final deliverables, or?

Brian Bosché:
Final deliverables. Yeah. You're not just, "Here's your logo. Thanks."

Brian Gundell:
God. Now I'm going into my job folder to count. Well, so our contract was not just for the rebrand, there was some additional collateral that was part of the contract that would kind of skews that. But individual logo files, I have two, three, four, five, six ... eight folders. There's three logos slicks, each logo folder has a CMIK folder, a Pantone, a swatch folder, and an RGB folder. Then the folders in there have AIPs PDF formats, and then JPEG and PNG formats for the RGB folders.

Brian Gundell:
And let's see. This is the alternate word mark. It appears on one, two, three, four, five back. So, there's six files in each of those sub folders. So six times this 24 times this 72 per folder times eight.

Brian Bosché:
Geez. Yeah. So you're spanning a lot of different-

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. So probably thousand deliverables is not too far off. There's 576 just in individual logo files alone as part of the final deliverable.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Because you're right, you just have to put it in so many different places and you have to cover all those bases.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah, we have the conference color backgrounds so it's on white, on blue, on yellow. Then we have one color versions of all those, one color positive, one color reversed in white, black, yellow, and blue. And then for the yellow, it's two versions. There's a positive and a reverse version of that. So for each version of the logo and there are let's see, it's five different logos in the logo family.

Brian Bosché:
What's the timeline for this? From project kickoff to final delivery, how long does something like this take?

Brian Gundell:
It has been seven months for this particular project and counting. So we kicked this off mid-October. It's when I flew out to New Orleans for the initial meeting with the conference after the contract got signed. Longer if you count the proposal process. So that initial proposal was back in August, so add another two. So nine months.

Brian Bosché:
These are massive projects.

Brian Gundell:
They are massive projects. There's a lot of people involved, there's a lot of stakeholders involved. And this has been a simpler process because there's been fewer decision-makers. And like I said, it's still ongoing. We have the championship marks that we're still working on, we're still working on collateral. We're still working on application stuff for them. So this will probably go on another two, three months at least. So it'll be at the end of the day, about a full year.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. What's the reception been like?

Brian Gundell:
Well, the design community loves it and the fans hate it.

Brian Bosché:
Really? Why is that?

Brian Gundell:
It's different.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. There's always going to be the adjustment period.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. Sports fans are the most obstinate change averse demographic in the brand identity world. They just do not handle change well.

Brian Bosché:
Do you see that for most of your projects?

Brian Gundell:
No. This again is a fairly atypical, but you're also talking about sports in the South where people are particularly passionate and fervent about keeping things the way that they are and not changing them.

Brian Bosché:
And there's so many different groups and members that you have to take into account as well.

Brian Gundell:
There are. And also right now people just have nothing better to do.

Brian Bosché:
It's a form of entertainment.

Brian Gundell:
It is. And logo bashing, particularly on Twitter is an art form.

Brian Bosché:
It's amazing. The ramp unveiling was great punching bag, yeah, [crosstalk 00:45:29] all the time.

Brian Gundell:
So yeah, Sun Belt fans at least the ones at Twitter that are vocal and most of them are affiliated with a particular member institution that shall remain anonymous. They were just tearing it to shreds.

Brian Bosché:
But when you tie it back to the goals that are original, making it more prestigious, making it easier to read, you accomplished those goals.

Brian Gundell:
Absolutely.

Brian Bosché:
I think it looks amazing.

Brian Gundell:
The conference loves it. The conference is super happy. The members of the conference are happy, and that's really all that matters. The fans will get on board, they'll come around. There was an interesting comment, we got a photo from Georgia State's equipment department with the logo sewn onto one of their football jerseys. And we posted that as after the fact as part of the release.

Brian Gundell:
And some Georgia State fans were like, "Okay. I wasn't really feeling it before, but now that I see it on the actual Jersey in our team colors, I like it a lot more. It's like, "Yeah, of course."

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, that's what it's for.

Brian Gundell:
Exactly. So I think fans will eventually come around. And I was looking at some message boards. It was much more in even mix of positive and lukewarm responses, not even negative, just kind of mixed responses.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. But you kind of see people playing it. Once you see that, then that's when it goes, "Okay great. This fits."

Brian Gundell:
A lot of people were also just from sheer lack of understanding were like, "How could you make all these schools change the logo and spend all this money on new uniforms, new playing surfaces in the middle of a pandemic?" It's like, "We started this last year, we had no idea this was going to happen." And I did an interview with with sportslogos.net with Chris Creamer and he addressed that and was like, "We're actually not forcing our members to roll this out as quickly as we normally would because we're being sensitive to the financial impact that the pandemic is having on everybody. So we're trying to be understanding and lenient and easy going when it comes to the actual rollout of all of this."

Brian Bosché:
Because people don't understand those timelines.

Brian Gundell:
Exactly.

Brian Bosché:
How many would say this is a year long process?

Brian Gundell:
Right. Right.

Brian Bosché:
Well, good to hear. I thought it was incredible work, was really excited to cover it. As we close this down, any parting shots, best learning? I usually close these out with like what's a big takeaway that you'd love the audience to hear about our rebranding process or about this specific project?

Brian Gundell:
I think one of the things that a lot of people don't understand particularly about sports branding is that there are so many conversations and considerations that go on behind the scene. It was one of the reasons that Brandon Moore and I, another designer that I'm good friends with, we did the baseball New Zealand rebrand out in the public because we wanted people to understand that there are considerations that they may not have any idea about.

Brian Gundell:
A great example from that is the sporting icon for the nation of New Zealand is silver fern, and that's really owned by the All Blacks rugby team. So the expectation, and we got a lot of people commenting before we even touched the sketchpad, "Oh, you need to do a baseball with the silver fern leaves as the baseball laces. That's it. It's designed itself." And the CEO of baseball, New Zealand said, "Absolutely, under no circumstance are you to do anything related to a silver fern."

Brian Gundell:
And we were like, "Okay, can we ask why?" He said, "It's owned by baseball New Zealand and it's co-opted by every other sporting organization, most prominently New Zealand softball, who's our chief rival for players and competition. So we want to look outside of that to stand out in the crowd and do something unique." Makes perfect sense when you put it that way. And we were more than happy to oblige that.

Brian Gundell:
But had we not posted that conversation as part of the project, we would have been torched by people in New Zealand, by design community. Like, "How could you not do this?" It's really easy when you know why.

Brian Bosché:
There's logical reasons. Yep.

Brian Gundell:
Yeah. So, there's a reason behind everything. The designers who work on this stuff, they care as much as you do. They're fans as much as you are. It's important to them. They want to do good work, and there's nothing that they do intentionally just to piss you off. We're not out to get you and ruin your team, we promise.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. That's great. Well, on that note, Brian, thank you so much for coming on. For me not going through that many rebrands really insightful to kind of learn how this process is done. So yeah, thank you so much and have a good one.

Brian Gundell:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.