Remembership, Part 4: Objects

[Editor’s Note: Membership card designer Scott M.X. Turner is back with this week’s installment of Remembership, his retrospective series about the Uni Watch membership card program. Enjoy. — PL]

By Scott M.X. Turner

Membership card designs sometimes enter a 3D realm. Members request all sorts of non-jersey designs. Even if a jersey is involved, there might be elements that go beyond fabric and appliqués. So this week’s Remembership draws on some of those object-driven requests. We’ll deal with some obvious objects in future posts — hats, helmets, banners, race cars, etc. This post will be for more unusual objects.

Card designs based on objects need an extra degree of tactility. Shine, shadows, grooves, fabric; they’re tougher nuts to crack than name-and-number layouts. At the same time, they’re a lot of fun to work on. Figuring out how to render a belt buckle or ring is part of that joy. Occasionally I don’t have to dive that deeply — for his seat in the old Kingdome, for example, Brian K. Stoner asked that we not include any shines or shadows. He wanted just the seat number on the seat color, flat and bold.

We’ve fielded 17 requests for designs featuring numbered bibs from cycling, track-and-field, gymnastics, and cross-country skiing. Because they’re pinned or stapled on and have folds, tears, bends and shading, I count these bibs as objects.

I made a bib template from our initial effort (Mark Mayall’s Roger Bannister uni). Some of the bibs needed fresh designs, and each one has subtle details. It was nice that five members requested that their cycling designs carry Uni Watch’s name or logos. Bill Austin’s card was the first of those — so long ago that the site’s URL was still UniWatchBlog.com! (Geoff Baker’s is also from that era.)

For this next batch: Bill Riley’s own bib from the 2000 Boston Marathon is in a frame on his wall. Hence, no pins, staples, or backing jersey. Bert Ayers’s Tour de France polka-dot image isn’t from the race itself, but rather from one of Uni Watch’s merch offerings from a few years ago. Tommie Smith and John Carlos are heroes of mine, so I was thrilled when Lloyd Alaban requested Smith’s 1968 Mexico City jersey. For Bill Rodgers’s New York Marathon, I had to include the advertising bank’s partial wordmark on the bib. You’d think a major 1960s/’70s bank’s wordmark would be easy to find on the internet. I had to use a matchbook cover being auctioned on eBay to reference the correct font.

Occasionally we need to render the designs vertically. Here are three cards that worked better that way. The fringe on the Penn State Nittany Lions mascot scarf would later come in handy, as you’ll see in a minute.

Three members asked for the velcroed nameplates caddies wear at the Masters. Three different positions, shadings and sizes. I can’t explain why — they all felt right at the time. Each time I used different source material (and I obviously didn’t check back on the previous version).

That scarf fringe I mentioned earlier was repurposed for these Caribous of Colorado NASL designs. It’s fun to let fringe drape over the card’s borders.

That’s it for our roundup of objects! But before we wrap, some housekeeping from last week’s Los Angeles Lakers-themed post:

• Paul and I both remembered working on cards from the Lakers’ pre-purple era, but I couldn’t find them. I’ve found them now, however! With apologies to the members who we skipped last time:

• Also, a commenter asked if we’ve made more Houston Astros tequila sunrise cards than Lakers cards. The answer is YES. We’ve issued 19 Lakers cards and 22 tequila sunrise cards featuring various styles of names and numbers [plus there’s another tequila sunrise order in the pipeline — Paul]. Which is the most-requested team for membership cards? I’ll have that answer later in the series.