This week’s post is inspired by Drew Hamlet, who is the Art Director for Seattle Kraken; we then received a prompt to create a hockey jersey to for the Coachella Valley Firebirds, the Kraken’s affiliate team in California, and this jersey is meant to promote the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. What a mashup of different ideas! One challenge of this design problem is many Firebirds fans are residents of the Coachella Valley area, and they might have very mixed feelings about the Coachella festival because it is a big disruption in their everyday lives and their experience of their home town.
My design is here:
To create this jersey, I first did some research on branding for both the Firebirds team and the Coachella Festival, searching for examples of real Firebirds jerseys and Coachella 2023 promotional materials. I noticed that the Firebirds jerseys have the same general layout as Kraken jerseys with similar proportions of stripes and that the Firebird logo always has a dark outline/background no matter what color the logo is placed on.
Although Coachella doesn’t have an official style guide for this year published yet, I found some key promotional materials on the web that I used as inspiration for the color palette and design elements on my jersey:
I noticed the the Firebirds and Coachella both have a fairly bright orange and a light blue in their color palettes, so I decided that using these colors would be a way to begin to establish a natural connection between the two brands. I decided to generally stay true to the Firebird logo and design elements on the jersey but to integrate Coachella’s color palette and three key design elements, the background gradient of the blue sky, the swooping line of balloons, and the palm leaves. While the orange balloons make the reference to the Coachella Festival really clear, the sky, palm leaves, and sunset-inspired color palette reflect the gorgeous natural setting that the Coachella Valley is known for. This setting makes the Festival extra magical for festival attendees who are visiting the area but also reminds local residents of the Coachella Valley area of a source of pride for their home. Natural beauty is something that everyone can celebrate and be inspired by!
To make my design, I tried some of the new selection techniques that I just learned in Photoshop class this week, and I felt great about being able to cement in a skill that is new and useful. I also used the freeform gradient tool in illustrator to create my balloons, and I was pretty excited to discover that this new way of working (for me) produced a result that I really liked. So, in addition to the design itself, this project was pretty successful for me because I was able to practice some technical skills that I enjoyed and hope to use again.
