NYU Athletics Rebrand
During the summer of 2021 I had the opportunity to bring the new brand of NYU Athletics to life, leading and working on the design system/implementation across touchpoints.
Design Execution
I personally recruited and lead a group of designers and creatives to establish a design system that could be scaled to our various digital and pyhsical brand needs.
- Social media graphics for coverage of gamedays, final scores of competition, birthdays, and more
- Website assets and thumbnails for stories and other features
- Recruiting pages/microsites for individual teams
- Print collatoral for various needs including posters, bag tags, stickers, and t-shirts
Graphic Design Work
The following graphics were designed for social media to support the individual team accounts content and recruiting efforts.
Challenges
Working on this project, many challenges popped up along the way. Resources were limited, and while designing the system of the brand was difficult, implementing it was even harder.
Design
Going through the process to bring brand values and pillars to life via design was really challeneging! Thanfully, we had an amazing designer on our team who helped take us through exercises to identify the key elements we wanted to visually represent and identify a storyline represetnative of the student athelte experience. We settled on visually communicating the concept that athletes at NYU travel all over NYC and the country in order to train and compete, using every mode of transportation there is (buses, trains, cars, bikes, you name it!) and we incorporated the map grid, and subway stop markers into the graphic elements that you can see in the images I have designed above.
Strategy
As a D3 school, we didn't have the bandwidth to hire and staff social media creatives for each individual team account, but this didn't mean the priority wasn't high. From a recruiting standpoint, an active instagram accounts in the era of COVID-19 when students couldn't visit campus was vital. Freshman on the women's soccer team say they chose NYU in part because our social media gave them an inside look into a team they wanted to be a part of. After all, it was their only way to get to know the culture and group without vists happening in person. In order to keep team accounts active and on brand, I developed and organized templates for all game and coverage content, and a google drive system with assets, photos, media day content, and instructions for how to use in one place. I worked to train and support designated social media reps from each team.
Outcome & Reflection
While this project was just the first step in the evolution of the NYU Athletics brand (check out where the current team has brought things now!), it got the ball rollings, and brought a lot of exctiing new attention to the department. Coming out of the Pandemic, morale amoungst student athletes was low. As we were working on the rebrand we were trying to be methodical in distributing updated merch with the new logos and due to supply chain issues, getting blanks was proving to be difficult. I was feeling an increased amount of frustration from my peers, people wanted to get their new gear, and were growing impatient. Through conversations with our team and athletic director, we were able to place words to those feelings— merchandise and stickers and all of that serves as a way to be prideful and represent community. It wasn't that student-athletes were desperate for yet another dri fit shirt, they wanted an NYU Athletics dri fit to be able to proudly workout in the city and at home and representing their team and school. After identifiying this, I had the idea to print various stickers with the different lockups and just distribute them to as many people as possible. Passing by classrooms and seeing the stickers on my teammates laptops, or in the gym on their water bottles was really rewarding. I have been designing and printing merchandise since high school in my first graphic design class, and finally connecting the dots and puting words to what makes a team shirt or pair of embriodered sweatpants so special was a really cool moment and has influenced the way I think about all my design work now!