Good Tuesday morning, Uni Watchers! I hope everyone had a good day yesterday.
I’m back with UW pal/contributor/graphic designer Chris Diamond, who today brings us the sixth, and final part (Part VI) his next project: taking the 28 “City Connect” (CC) uniforms unveiled over the past four seasons and tweaking them. But that’s not all — as a graphic designer, Chris brings his unique perspective to the CC program, and offers his thoughts on each teams’ Aesthetics, Functionality, and “Connection” as well as his prescribed tweaks. For each team listed below, you can click on the uniform graphic for a much higher resolution view of Chris’ tweaked design. I’ve once again used my rudimenatry MS Paint skills, to place Chris’ tweaked design next to the actual CC uniform, so you can see the differences.
As we’ve seen, the MLB CC uniforms are some of the most polarizing uniforms ever introduced; if you asked 10 people to rank them from best to worst, you’d likely get 10 completely different lists. But you know what they say about opinions — everyone has one. So while I may disagree with Chris’ opinions (just as he surely differs on my own rankings), he takes a look at them through the eyes of a graphic designer, and offers his thoughts and opinions from that perspective. So far, Chris has tackled the American League East, American League Central, the American League West, the NL East, and the NL Central.
Here’s Chris. Enjoy!
Tweaking MLB CCs – A Graphic Designer’s View of the City Connect Program: NL West
by Chris Diamond
MLBs City Connect Program is in its fourth year now, and by the All Star break all teams bar the Yankees and Athletics will have one. As Phil’s piece covering the CCs said, I think it’s fair to say that opinion on UW has so far been quite mixed for the program. But are the unis really that bad? In particular, how do they rate from a pure design viewpoint? That is excluding anything that relates to any historical or emotional investment the reviewer might have. Almost impossible to do you say? Well yes, for anyone brought up with baseball it is very hard to be objective. And anyone in North America, even if they don’t follow baseball closely, will have been exposed to it their whole lives. But as some of you may know, I’m a British graphic designer and have lived in the UK my whole life which has almost completely insulated me from it. Unlike Football, there has never really been consistent TV coverage over here and it’s only been in the last 5 years that I’ve been able to watch games on MLBTV. So I while I know quite a lot about baseball unis now, that is all recent knowledge. Also as a Brit I have been exposed to cricket my whole life. This went through its own equivalent of the CC effect way back in the 1990s when coloured clothing was introduced (domestically) for the first time to similar polar reactions. Hopefully all these factors give me a different viewpoint to review the CC unis.
So I’m going to try and take an objective as possible look at the CC unis from these angles. I’ll rate each design (A-E) purely on aesthetic grounds, then look at functional aspects (how well does it work as a uniform?). I’ll also look at how well I think it succeeds at connecting the team and city. Finally I’ll look if there are any tweaks that could improve each design (from any angle). OK ready? Let’s go!
NL West
Arizona DiamondBacks
Aesthetics A
The Snakes CC has been one of the more popular designs, especially since they got some matching pants. The design leans heavily in to the area’s desert landscape and Spanish heritage. As a design it’s pretty nice with the subdued colour palette and smart “Serpientes” snake-like wordmark. It is quite strange though for the club to have a CC that features “desert sand” when the regular unis have pretty much phased it out as a colour in favour of a “sponsor” friendly turquoise.
Functionality A
The numbers and NOB are clear so no issues as a uni.
Connection B+
I feel the connection is good to both the area and club, but this is meant to be a connection to the city (or state) so having the team name (even in Spanish) takes away from that a bit.
Tweaks
Like with other teams who don’t name-check the city/area I think this is the obvious tweak. I was in two mind about using the snake-font but it wouldn’t work as well for “Arizona”, but I did keep the “S” snake logo. I also thought this was one case where a sand cap might look good.
Colorado Rockies
Aesthetics B-
The idea of using a mountain based design theme is not original for Colorado based teams, but as the team name literally IS the mountains you can forgive the Rockies for using it! The original design was very green heavy, but the team has gone to using white pants which makes for a better look IMO.
Functionality A
The numbers and NOB are clear so no issues as a uni.
Connection A
A mountain theme for the ROCKIES could hardly be bettered.
Tweaks
The unis are green based in some kind of license-plate inspired concept. This was a bit of an epic fail for a team who have purple as a colour which (if you remember Bob Ross) is the colour of mountains! So a straight swap of green with purple. I’ve also made the cap white because this is one occasion when “icy white” could actually mean something.
Los Angeles Dodgers
Aesthetics B+
The Dodgers are on their second CCs already. The first was a bit of a half-hearted effort and best forgotten. The current ones are quite nice, mixing a multi-colour speckle pattern with a dynamic swoop of a wordmark in two shades of blue. The red tags on the sleeves have been made into an asymmetrical design quirk, but actually look nice without having to do all that. The only slight fail for me is the LA-in-a-D frankenlogo. Mixing fonts in one logo has to be done with care and although both are Dodgers fonts it’s a bit of an ugly cut-and-shut to my design eye.
Functionality E+
This is where the designers let their enthusiasm get the better of their common sense. The front numbers are way too small and are located near the left shoulder above the wordmark. And the rear number is cut off at the bottom by the NOB which is *under* the number. You typically see this format in other sports when the top of the back (the prime position) has an advert. No such reason here apart from contrariness and doing things different for the sake of it.
Connection C+
The storytelling around the design connects well enough to the city, and is miles better than the old ones which didn’t even have Los Angeles on them.
Tweaks
I’ve moved the front number down and made it visible. I’ve ejected the frankenlogo from the cap and relegated it to a jersey patch and socks. In its place I’ve stuck in a white swoop front panel with a new LA logo made from the same font as the excellent wordmark.
San Diego Padres
Aesthetics C-
The Padres regular colours are a unique (for MLB) brown and gold. But that doesn’t really connect much to the city so the team can be forgiven for looking to something else for the CCs. I applaud them for really going for it and picking a combo of pink/mint/yellow based on city aesthetics and also connecting to the red/green of their Mexican fans. But the colour palette is sadly where the good design choices ended. Fail one is choosing a wordmark font from the same stable as Comic Sans the most reviled font of all time! Then splitting the characters horizontally between mint and pink. This would be OK if the two colours were similar intensity. But the hot pink drowns the mint so at any distance it disappears leaving only the top pink half. The same is true for the asymmetric pink and mint sleeves. The cap is solid enough, but there is nothing splitting the hot pink and mint so the former visually bleeds into the latter.
Functionality D
Luckily the numbers aren’t split like the wordmark, but the NOB is yellow on white which is invisible even on TV close-ups most of the time.
Connection C+
As mentioned the colours connect really well to the city and the cap logo and friar patch hooks just enough into the team.
Tweaks
Bizarrely, the team designed a really nice font which is used in the MLB CC Promo but nowhere else. I’ve made a new wordmark using this and based the rest of the design elements on it. I’ve also fixed the cap colour bleed issue.
San Francisco Giants
Aesthetics B+
The Giants came up with a really good design idea based around the Golden Gate bridge and the fog that swirls around the bay. The orange colour ties in with the team colour and the bridge makes a striking design motif. Sadly they just came up short by taking the fog idea too literally meaning design elements fade away completely on the white uniform.
Functionality D
The fog fading makes a mess of most of the design elements including the numbers.
Connection A
A really strong connection to both the city and the team. It would have been nice to get San Francisco on the jersey, but the large G has more impact than a row of really small letters would have.
Tweaks
This was an easy fix – just make the fog grey rather than white and the problems are solved without losing the concept.
Thanks, Chris!
OK readers, time to have your say. Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below! And please give Chris a round of applause for the entire series! This was a lot of fun, and I think in most cases, the CC’s he tweaked are better than the originals!
Although I dislike the entire CC program,: huge improvements were made on the CCs. D-Backs, SD much more readable. Like the white front on the Dodgers cap but logo still a bit off. Would like to see back of Dodgers top. Colorado much better but may add a purple bill to the snowcap cap. Like the darker orange for SF but the theme off the uniform makes any improvements difficult. All in all, good job!
Thanks Kent!
GTGFTS: 1956 NFL Championship Game Bears at Giants December 30, 1956.
Nice work, Chris. Big upgrade on SD (love that wordmark) and LA, especially the cap. I prefer the panel cap to the “icy white” for Colorado, but the color swap is nice, as is the fix for the Giants. The only thing I don’t like here is the fix on Arizona. Using such a literal reading of “city connect” has led to swapping out a terrific “Serpientes” wordmark for something that looks like the usual Arizona uniform. Arizona has serpientes; I would have left it alone.
GTGFTU packers chargers week 6 2015
Nice job on the CC uniforms. I just wish they eliminated the logos from the socks — they are so distracting and in real usage they never seem to stay where they are supposed to.
Colorado: The Rockies CC is green because they’re meant to evoke Colorado license plates, which feature a similar design, in green.
Arizona: Why not Serpientes? That is actually one of the most fun parts of that uniform. Otherwise it’s just another bad Dbacks uni.
San Diego: You’re kind of missing the point of the CC, which is a _connection to the community_. The lettering they chose was very deliberate. If you’ve spent any time in heavily Hispanic cities, you will see this typeface.
LA: Nah, man. The cap logo was fine. The weird number placement was fine. The only real problem with these was the truncated numbers on the back.
SF: nothing will fix the fact that the G looks like WordArt but sure. make the colors darker.
Exactly, I feel like part of the point this guy is missing in his series of alterations is the personality and local connection for each team. I’m a graphic designer as well, so I see what he’s going for. But I strongly disagree about needing to have the city name across the chest. Every team already has a road jersey with the city name on it. I like the ones that use a different moniker there and if I were doing my own series, I would’ve leaned in further for those. I would’ve done stuff like Daygo for the Padres and Mile High for the Rockies. As a Mariner fan, that was something I was hoping they would do differently with ours.
Once again, these tweaks are generally huge improvements. One note: I think the Arizona and Colorado jerseys would work much better as “city connects” if they said “Phoenix” and “Denver”. One of the key failures of the CC program is that some of the CCs don’t even feature the name of the city they are supposed to be “connecting” with!
Crucial point made. Lean in on the city identity even if it’s been left out of the team name.
Naming after states instead of cities is a deliberate marketing choice by those teams to attract a core fanbase that is statewide. The CCs are meant to connect with that core fanbase, so it follows that they should be “State Connect” uniforms for those teams.
While I do like the purple as an alternate for the rox idk if I’d call the green an “epic fail”. The city connect look is by far the most popular look at the stadium nowadays and the team really leans into it. I think the purple version here would be a great alternate if we went to some version of the city connect set full time.
Great improvements on the CC all around, especially the LA hat and the SF fog. I would have retained Serpientes, though.
“The unis are green based in some kind of license-plate inspired concept. This was a bit of an epic fail for a team who have purple as a colour…”
So it was an epic fail for Colorado to use green when they specifically referenced their (“some kind of”) license plate design. A design which is easily identifiable, arguably iconic among state license plates, and has been green since the 60s.
Got it. Hell of a take.
A lot of these take the personality out of what truly “connects” to the city/state for each team.
I’m not a fan of Colorado’s current situation with what look to me like slow-pitch softball tops, but I’ll admit the purple makes it look a little more professional. (Please remove your caps and have a moment of silence for Paul.)
The only City Connect uni that I hate-hate-hate is the Padres’. I will admit that this revision at least makes the uniforms more readable, but those colors have to go!
AZ: I love the idea of the D’backs using turquoise to highlight the connection to the Southwest but I really like this look better.
COL: have to disagree, the green was not an “epic fail” but part of the nod to Colorado license plates, and I really liked their original. This is fine and closer to the team’s normal look, but that goes against the stated intent of the CC program, where the actual CC seem to come closer.
LAD: you definitely improved their first 2 attempts but that is low bar to clear.
SD: no objections but this is another one I really liked because it went far away from the team’s identity and embraced the region.
SF: as with the Giants, you made a mediocre concept much better. With such a rich cultural history, Nike dropped the ball on this one.
Great stuff!
Can you do a Phillies, Cincinnati, and Royals? I would love to see how you fix these, SPECIFICALLY the Philly CC.
Um…if you read the introduction, you’d see Chris has now finished tweaking every team. Scroll up to the top of the page and click on the division (in these cases, Phillies are NL East, Reds are NL Central, and Royals are AL Central), and you’ll see how he tweaked those teams. All of them, including SPECIFICALLY the Philly CC.