Creating City Connect Graphics from Scratch

Good morning, Uni Watchers, and a Happy Humpday to one and all.

One the 2025 City Connect uniforms started leaking coming out, Ticker Assistant and multi-talented graphic artist Susan Freeman suggested it might be a cool project to create City Connect graphics for all the new CCs, from scratch, in a unique UW style. Having very limited graphical skills myself (at one time, I was fairly adept at GIMP, which is the open source equivalent of Photoshop, but I’m still an MS Paint devotee at heart), I was all in favor of this idea, but I don’t think either of us realized how much work is actually involved in creating these graphics. But Susan has done an outstanding job. You saw a bit of a preview of her work on Monday, when I published my 2025 CC Rankings, and Susan created the splash image:

But that’s just a very small taste of what she’s created. I asked her if she would share the entire set, as well as to explain a bit of what was involved. I’ll turn it over to her now.

Enjoy!

• • • • •Creating City Connect Graphics From Scratch
by Susan Freeman

I have no idea what I was thinking when I decided to try and draw some City Connect jerseys. I had just seen a cool graphic on the internet of last year’s jerseys in a grid fashion. I told Phil we should do something like this… Holy Moly! But I can say it was very fun and my Illustrator skills have improved immensely. However, keep in mind I am no Scott M.X. Turner – I am a novice! But I will say, reading that article last year about the entire process of making the membership cards, I realized I kind of was doing it right.

Being a novice, I typically go find a starting graphic and do an image trace – and that is what I did for my jersey template. Of course that turned out to only be a starting point, as I wanted to make the images useful as a reference (at least a while after I started drawing jerseys). Sometimes I hand-trace myself and manually draw things too – which I ended up doing as well. My biggest hindrance is not having the right fonts. I can try to find some to download – but my download list is too massive to search through. So I have to find a similar font and hand-edit it. Illustrator uses vectors and you can save text into a vector – it gives you little handles you manipulate to make the letters look how you want. The new thing (or for a decade or two) is to have stupid nicks or tails on letters. Sometimes you can draw the extra tail and then use Illustrator to combine it all into one shape for you. When you start messing with fonts, you need to use rectangles and shapes to make sure your lines are parallel and all the legs are the same thickness. That takes forever.

As for the logos, this was never intended to be anything real or big – take some shortcuts and just try to represent a jersey. Some logos are just traced and don’t really fit the cartoon texture of my illustrations, but they do add some texture for some of the patches. There is not a huge variety of materials for City Connect so this took some effort to find suitable images to work with. But as I kept getting deeper, I kept adding more detail and sometimes just drawing logos outright was the right thing.

Houston Astros

I love them! This was not my first one, though – I drew the Nats jersey first. At one point I decided to add the pants to make it complete and tell the story. This was the same as the sleeve trim and I am fairly good at this technique of tracing (to get the right “more graphic” look) and then clipping that image into a shape. The pant stripe close-up turned out really well. The STROS font really sucked because I needed triangles to hand draw/edit the font. And honestly, the cap logo took forever to get right.

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Washington Nationals

This was my first. And it was kind of curiosity that made me decide to see if I could do it. I traced a map image of DC and manipulated the colors. Getting the ballpark in the right place was harder than it should have been. I think they took some liberties laying that out because I have not seen the river on any real jersey. The sleeve trim is masked from the city diversity mosaic (as is the pants stripe). Probably the easiest font and numbers – I just hand drew them. I am going to add the batting helmet logo to this one later. Being the first jersey I did, the template I found to start with was raglan – so when I went to make the next jersey, it was an “oh shit” moment.

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San Francisco Giants

Yes, I had to draw every single one of those groovy record grooves. This easily took the longest. Creating the chest wordmark was a bit of a challenge too – layering the different gradient shading pieces in the back was tricky since I had to trace this one. Again, graphically it looks really good – some of the CCs just look better rendered instead of on the field.

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Colorado Rockies

Colorful Colorado – but I really liked version one better (and with the green pants because it matched the license plate better). The font was a true pain because I did not have a good font to start with. I did some tracing on the mountain logo, so that was easy. I recently had to reposition where the purples meet (or don’t meet) from when I had first drawn the jersey. The cap bubble shows the inside brim. That softball top collar – those nights were hell trying to draw that with my limited skills.

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Chicago White Sox

You all know I am a Texas Tech girl – so obviously, I LOVE these. Just as a uniform – silly for the White Sox. I was watching an Astros game but not really paying attention and looked up and saw this glorious red and black in dynamic mode on my 4K. Absolute hardest wordmark because of the radial arching. If that is a thing in Illustrator, I certainly have not found it yet. And the font on the actual neck message is wrong because I had to hand-draw it (should be the easiest font ever to find, but no). And once I hand-drew it, I did not know how to curve it. Typically, you write the text on a curve – but once you “create outlines,” I don’t know how to do it.

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Miami Marlins

I would like a word with this graphic designer, too. (See the Diamondbacks paragraph below.) This is probably my least favorite and I could spend more time on it to make it better. As for the uni itself, very tired. I used my hand-drawn M and a traced/modified marlin to get the Marlin M done – several layers to get the right parts in front of the M. Same thing with the 305 cap logo. It was tricky.

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Arizona Diamondbacks

My God… I learned new skills for sure on this one! Getting all the snakeskin diamonds to do one gradient instead of each one being its own gradient required a Google search. And if I ever meet the graphic designer who decided to put the pants trim diamonds in increasing/decreasing sizes… well, I cannot be held responsible for what may happen. I thought the uni was kind of dumb when I first saw it – but it is a really good looking graphic set.

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Boston Red Sox

I absolutely love the execution from the idea to the uniform. Actually, I started this one from the leaked images. But this graphic was complete before they unveiled. And it was so much fun adding the number details. Hands down, a classic. I think this one wins (or at least tied with Astros for me) – but graphically, a tad boring with NNOB.

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Caps

I wasn’t even going to do caps… until I did. And I certainly was not going to do any BP caps. Whatever. Laying them all out together looked cool. And then I did a stacked image of the two caps for each team side by side (previous link). The Boston B was fun because they included the outside layer (usually two colors or no outside edge) and I had to put a gray line in there to make it look 3-D.

• • • • •Thanks, Susan! Fantastic project and great job. Thanks for sharing.

Readers? Thoughts?