About the project:

Starting in 2022, I led our internal creative team in developing a comprehensive rebrand for the Ravens’ visual identity. We considered our market and audience in every decision along the way and collected important feedback from our colleagues and partners that remained critical during the brainstorming and design process. Setting our goals first and foremost, we identified ways to update and improve the visuals that could address a variety of pain points and present a fresh and exciting collection of visuals that each designer could deploy throughout their work.

Objectives

Our team’s collective goals:

1. Build upon and expand the Ravens brand to better reflect the energy of OUR CITY, OUR TEAM and OUR FANS. 

2. Develop creative work that engages our CURRENT FANS and excites a NEW GENERATION OF FANS. 

3. Use feedback from our target audiences to LEARN, REFINE and GROW THE BRAND, at all stages of development. 

4. Develop a NEW VISUAL IDENTITY that can serve as a foundation for the brand for seasons to come. 

Inspiration

There’s no better place to look than right in our own backyard—the city of Baltimore— to find visual inspiration for new Ravens creative. One iconic part of Baltimore history is the story of Globe Press. Founded in 1929 in Baltimore, this family-owned printer grew to be one of the nation’s largest showcard printing companies. They produced posters to advertise concerts for touring acts like Mavis Staples, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, The Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and many more. The typography in these classic posters was letterpress printed using blocks of wood type that have their own completely distinct grit—just like our city. From this starting inspiration (and a few other sources), I identified a visual theme we labeled “PRESS" – it included graphics that fit the theme of “Stamped, Rolled, Hand Pressed, Screen Printed, Halftones, and a whole lotta CHARM.”

Typefaces

Updating a brand’s typefaces can prove challenging, but we saw this as an opportunity to help reinforce our fresh design aesthetics, and in doing so, adapting some new fonts would be key. We chose Cheddar Gothic as our MVP headline/display typeface for the rebrand. The font features a “rough” version, as well as multiple “clean” weights to give our team plenty of variety. The “rough” type calls back to our inspiration from letterpressed, silkscreened, and hand-printed type. We also paired Cheddar Gothic with more clean, contemporary fonts like Eurostyle, Tungsten, and Trade Gothic (one of our signature brand fonts).

Original Graphic Elements & Illustrations

New graphic elements we introduced leaned into the pride for our home state of Maryland. Over the years, elements of the Maryland flag had been used in the team’s design, but with the rebrand, we found an opportunity to solidify these elements of the flag as one-color graphic assets that could be used for backgrounds and much more. I also illustrated a few ravens to serve as exciting general images, and amplify the intensity surrounding the game. The raven is a beautiful symbol to work with, and I just love illustrating them.

Examples

In the presentation above, you can view a few examples of projects I directly worked on that illustrate the process of rebranding the team’s visuals. I also worked indirectly on many other projects, from a role of art directing and/or consulting on how best to achieve the goals in mind while furthering the new visual direction. Thank you for taking the time to view the project and “Go Ravens!”

Collaborators:

• Brad Downs: SVP of Marketing

• Josh Lukin: Senior Director of Advertising & Branding

• Ken Lisse: Senior Designer

• Dave Heringer: Senior Social Media Designer

• Brent Airey: Senior Animator

• Shawn Hubbard: Player Photography (link)

• Jill Fannon: Photography (link)

• And many more collaborators within the Ravens Marketing, Digital Media, PR, and Broadcasting teams