UW Reader Improves the Identities of His Baseball Club in Auckland, New Zealand

Good Saturday morning, Uni Watchers. I hope everyone has had a good week — yet another busy one in the uniform department.

Reader Camryn Brown had recently been working to improve the identities of both his baseball club in Auckland, New Zealand and the regional baseball association itself. As the former involves uniforms, Cam thought this would be a fun project to share with the Uni-verse, and I wholeheartedly agree. I’ll let Cam take it from here. Enjoy!

• • • • •Improving the Identities of My Baseball Club in Auckland, New Zealand
by Camryn Brown

I’ve been a regular reader of Uni Watch since I came across it shortly after moving to San Francisco in late 2006 and found myself immersed in the rich, new-to-me world of US athletics aesthetics. Several years later I returned to my native Auckland, New Zealand and joined my local baseball club (North Shore) as a player and a parent of players. Over time, my passion for my club and my longstanding uni-obsessiveness combined into a series of projects to improve Shore’s uniforms and overall visual identity.

The first thing I noticed was that I could find at least nine versions of our club monogram and seven ways those nine versions varied. Given that the club was founded in 2010, I didn’t think we could justify a Detroit Tigers situation and so I created a standard design in Illustrator. At the time I didn’t have any particular role in the club and so I left things there.

However, I was able to turn to our jerseys themselves after the end of the 2022/23 season. Two seasons prior, the club had adopted a new jersey design that had proven problematic.

I considered it BFBS compared to our previous designs.

Other club members disliked the wordmark and that it was a pullover. The main problem was that the manufacturer had let us down and sewn the entire order several sizes smaller than the agreed specifications.

By the end of the 2022/23 season, many of our teams were wearing old sets from storage and our on-field look was very inconsistent. By this time I’d become Vice President of the club and took on the project to source new jerseys.

OK, I should now address the elephant in the room. We are not a purple club. Our primary colour is maroon. Specifically, the same maroon as worn by the local professional rugby union team as per the relatively common concept in New Zealand that geographic areas have standard sporting colours that every team purporting to represent that area should adopt if possible. (We’re a collection of Pittsburghs).

We are a maroon club but, I admit, we had found ourselves wearing purple from time to time. And red at other times. We had no documentation of what we meant by “maroon” and various manufacturers had interpreted it quite widely. So, I set about to create a standard for our maroon based on the idea that the colour should be a Pantone standard one (for uniform sublimation and printed material) as well as an ISACORD one (so we could get caps embroidered in the exactly correct shade as well). This seems simple but took quite a while to figure out. The Pantone name is “Cardinal” which is, I think, odd.

The uniform design process itself was not very complicated. What I wanted to do and what proved to be popular with the wider club were mostly the same things – use a “very baseball” North Shore wordmark, have a full button front, and include pinstripes. Pinstripes were not currently used by any club in Auckland and so were available to give us a distinct, traditional look. That was my main reasoning, but I also dislike headspoons. I don’t like how “busy” it feels to have piping and wordmarks interacting in the prime upper chest real estate. On that note, I’m sticking with my 2010 SF Giants away jersey until they see the light and remove the headspoon that was added in 2012.

Prior to generating concepts I designed the necessary graphical elements, again, in Illustrator. The new wordmark was a very mildly tweaked version of a purchased font that had a great traditional baseball look and struck me as fated when I saw it was called “Auckland.”

To generate concepts, I used the New Balance tool since our national parent body had signed a deal with them and was encouraging clubs to do the same. Having been burned by an independent manufacturer, we wanted to use a supplier with a reputation to protect. I did create a BFBS concept in case the club wanted to stay on that path. Luckily, the vast majority did not! Once the maroon pinstripe concept was approved I worked with New Balance to mock-up what their online tool could not, i.e. the correct shade of maroon, the desired angle and position of the wordmark, the correct width and shade of pinstripes, and so on. We did three or four rounds of tweaking before we settled on the final design.

We then had to wait a little before ordering the jerseys – first, we needed to secure the funds to make such a large purchase and, second, we had to wait to see what was happening with the Auckland Baseball Association (ABA) logo. We play in the ABA’s competition and wanted to feature the ABA logo on our shoulder. However, the ABA was considering a change in logo at the same time. The designer? Also me. As of mid-2023, the existing ABA logo was a derivation of the old Baseball New Zealand logo from before Brandon Moore’s 2018 redesign, was illegible at distance, and had no monotone version to better fit against diverse club colour schemes. In the end, I did a full visual standards document for the ABA and my new logo was accepted.

So, we received our new unis at the start of the 2023/24 season in October and they look really good.

I rounded out the project by working with New Balance to generate a set of other uniform elements, training gear, and supporter merch and by creating a very pedantic page on uniform standards for our club website. I’ve also tinkered with a club mascot (I used an initial result from the Midjourney AI and cleaned it up and vectorised it in Illustrator) and a club beer (named for the unpredictable bounce off the playing surface at our Stafford Park home).

__________Some photos of the uniforms in action:

And some views of the Auckland Baseball Association logo and script:

• • • • •Fantastic job on those uniforms, Cam! I agree they turned out really well (and I also love the regional baseball association upgrades as well). Great stuff!