Here’s another look at a project that we’re working on diligently with some new friends of ours. More soon…

Our team was recently approached to create artwork for a mixtape by 2 of our favorite ATL-based DJs, J-Sol & Apple Juice. We worked closely with the duo to carry our Hotlanta/baseball theme throughout the visual & sonic experience.

We’ll be sending out a physical copy of “Hit & Run” with every order from the PROCESS Online Boutique (while supplies last).

Also a digital version of “Hit & Run” is available for download.

Download (via Mediafire): Process Presents: “Hit & Run” The Mixtape

Our team has spent the last few months collaborating in private with the Graveyard Tavern on a unique project that we’ll be releasing this Thursday, August 26th. Here is a preview of the fitted ballcap that you’ll be able to purchase on Thursday night. To sweeten the deal, DJ Apple Juice will be curating the evening’s soundtrack. You don’t want to miss this celebration.

Stay tuned for a preview of the tee shirt that we created together.

Everyone knows that the Cleveland Cavaliers organization is approaching a new era of their franchise’s existence: The Post-LeBron Blues. I guess now was as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the teams on-court look. The timing is right and the reasons are right to re-examine things and figure out what this team is going to be about in the future. A buddy of mine writes for Ball Don’t Lie over at Yahoo! and I thought he brought up some valid points as to why he likes this new direction. I’m with him on lots of levels but I need to chime in, so here goes.

PROS:
1) Retro Colors & Faux-back look: I’m all about embracing their “Wine & Gold” colors of the past and bringing them back out. I’m a huge fan of classic, flat, varsity gold. That’s a huge plus for me.

2) Less is More: In the past few seasons, you’d see the Cavaliers on television wearing all sorts of uniforms. It got to the point to where a casual fan couldn’t identify the real HOME & ROAD uniforms from ALTERNATE 1 & ALTERNATE 2 from THROWBACK 1 or 2. It was a hot mess. I’m assuming that the Cavs will be sticking to 2 uniforms for now. One HOME jersey and one ROAD jersey. I think I read somewhere that according to NBA rules, a team must play 3 seasons with new HOME and ROAD jerseys before applying to get approval on an alternate.

CONS:
1) Inconsistency: I hate hate hate how the “C” logo on the road uniforms is gold on the jersey and white on the shorts. Why would they do that? Also, why does the sword appear locked-up with the “C” on the shorts, but not on the back of the jersey? A good logo should stay the same no matter where you put it. Between the HOME and AWAY uniforms the logo changes colors 3 times. Someone deserves a bitch-slap for that.

2) Typography: Really? That’s the best they could come up with? The CLEVELAND CAVALIERS + Adidas got together and decided to type some letters out in an arc? C’mon guys! This is the National Basketball League. The brands are GLOBAL! This is all you could crank out? This job feels rushed. Hire us and we’ll give you some typography worthy of Anderbro Varejao to wear across his chest.

Overall Score:

I realize how well the old-school Cavs jerseys have done over the years and I love the decision to make a semi-retro statement. However, I question whether these new jerseys have just created more of the same kind of graphic statement to Cavs fans who are less than enthused about possibly missing the playoffs for years to come. More crap, same colors… Anyway, I’m fine with the concept and decisions to make a new statement. However, I’m pissed-off that someone signed off on this and someone was paid to “not think”.

Earlier this year, Larry and I had the privilege of being brought onto a project for IQ Interactive. It was actually for IQ and not for one of their clients, which we were excited about. For awhile now, we have worked with IQ on a few projects and we were honored that they asked us to help them come up with a new identity. They just recently moved into a new office space and needed a fresh start. It was a great experience working with another company that we respect, create a brand new logo. More photos coming soon.

We’ve been working with some new friends in Charlotte on expanding our collection outside of apparel. If you’ve worked on saddles or chaps, you might be familiar with what this is. If you’re not, sorry for the cryptic image… we’ll clue you in really soon!

As part of this summer’s inaugural World Basketball Festival in NYC, Jay-Z has teamed up with Nike to design 5 pairs of “All Black Everything” Air Force 1’s to represent each of the 5 countries participating in the event - USA, China, France, Brazil, & Puerto Rico. Nike has donated the custom pairs for auction to benefit the Shawn Carter Scholarshop Foundation. Jay-Z owns a pair of each design, but now you can bid to be the only other person in the world to have these super limited Air Force 1’s. Bid Here!

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Being an ATLien ain’t easy. People are always trying to claim how their city does this or that better. I don’t really know or care what you think about your city, but I love mine.

ATL has it’s flaws, but what city doesn’t? There are lots of people working to bring more respect to the Southern Capital just like me. I wanted to show that pride when given the opportunity to create my own “__your city name__ AGAINST THE WORLD” tee at World Basketball Festival in NY. I bought 3 of these babies: 1 for me and 1 for each of the EC George’s and apparently 255 Studio is making them now. I had a bro that worked there stop me and take my picture while wearing the tee. He said, “Yea man, we started printing these today”. Well, I made mine 2 days before, cousin. When you have a good idea, word gets around and people jump on it immediately. Can’t hate on that…

New PROCESS Tommy Stickers just came in. They are available in Red or Black. Both are printed on clear vinyl, so they’ll look great on your lappy, skateboard, window, mirror, or iPhone. You can get yours at your PROCESS retailers soon or we’ll ship them with your Online Orders.

One of my students, Addie Courington, sent me this pic the other day. Obviously, she’s having a lot of fun with her KC Wizards logo project. It’s at this point that she’s going to make the breakthroughs to finish-off an amazing logo.

We spent an action-packed weekend in Charlotte, NC. While there, we attended the skateboard art show, Let the Good Times Roll (we had a board in the show) and took some stills for the PROCESS Summer ‘10 on the Camden block. It’s our 2nd home, so we figured it was about time we produced something there. Here’s super-intern, Chris Mosier, holding it down in the Common Market alleyway behind Black Sheep Skate Shop.

Our design company website is finally up and running. This has been a long time coming and it only happened through countless hours of hard work from every member of our team. Check it out! Visit: ECDesignCo.com

On a recent trip to New York City, I stopped by Nike Sportswear’s (NSW) 21 Mercer store for a 2-hour appointment to customize my very own Air Force 1 sneakers. The process is officially called NikeiD Bespoke that is an innovative design experience offering customers the opportunity to work one-on-one with Nike design consultants to customize over 31 aspects of the Air Force 1.

I had previously created other pairs of sneakers via the NikeiD program on the web and have always felt rather unimpressed with the finished products because I lacked a design inspiration from the get-go. I knew that this Bespoke experience was going to be more in depth and rewarding, so I needed a rock-solid concept.

I walked into the appointment knowing that I wanted to stick to the “Love & War” concept that fellow graphic designer Georgios Saliaris and I had previously created for our clothing line, We Are The Process (we call it “Process” for short). If you’ve seen the Love & War graphic tee that was part of the collection, perhaps you will see resemblance between that graphic and this pair of kicks. For those who haven’t seen the graphic, it involved criss-crossing graphics of a rose and dagger, which played on the idea of opposites. It is iconic and it utilized a Black/Red/Grey color palette.

With the concept understood, I knew I’d be able to make the design decisions that would result in a great looking pair of kicks that I would want to wear often.

See the rest of NikeiD Bespoke experience and my final sneaker photos after the jump.

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Like we said before, we’ve been working on a big project. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at last weekend’s work session.

Here’s another sneak peek into what we have been working on lately. This is a fake news paper that we put together for the rebranding of Epidemik Coalition. If you have been to our other site lately, ECDESIGNCO.com, you might have noticed that it’s under construction. Check back in 2 weeks and see what we have been up to. Promise you won’t be disappointed.

We work hard too. We’ve been really busy working on restructuring the way our company speaks about itself. The most exciting thing about this process is that it really brings all of our talents together in a way like never before. Also, a lot of Portfolio Center model-making flashbacks have come about recently. More to come soon…

This week, several of my students made significant breakthroughs on their sports logo projects, others are still finding their happy places with their logo marks. Often times, a designer can “have a hard time with the project” and feel stuck; which is often an excuse for not spending enough time on their assignments. Trust me, I had the same excuses as a student.

The way to get unstuck is to get out in the world and experience things that you wouldn’t normally do. Go cliff diving, get in a verbal argument, kick a soccer ball, punch a wall, get wasted, make out with someone, listen to loud music with the windows down, talk to a bum, or walk on a slack line with Mason Poe… Just do something to get out of your comfort zone and start paying astute attention to the world around you. The experiences can lead to lots of creativity.

I wanted to focus on Alyssa’s decision to rebrand the New Jersey Nets as the Brooklyn Beat, since they will be moving into a new arena in Brooklyn in 2 years time. Other ideas she had for names were the “Riders” and “Beats” but it made sense to remove the “s” from “Beats” to signify that all Brooklynites coexist within the same realm, groove, or rhythm.

The next step in her process is to generate imagery that will evoke Brooklyn without falling into the predicatble poor design stereotypes that exist within hip-hop, urban, and graffiti. Remember, it’s important for the new look of this franchise to communicate strongly to a global audience. The NBA is international. Pale-ass Asian bros like me still need to be able to buy into the team’s look and feel. What if I want to rock a Devin Harris jersey?

I think the easy thing to do is to gravitate to the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, and I think that using a singular piece of the bridge proves to be an interesting approach as a logo, although I think she should continue to explore other possibilities. I think that she’s going to have to create some kind of wordmark for the actual Brooklyn Beat name that will lock-up well with the mark. We’ll see how things develop!

Next week, we’ll see our groups’ initial business logos that were randomly assigned out of the Atlanta telephone book. I’m looking forward to seeing how they think outside of the sports realm.

This past week, my students spent a majority of their time doing research on their assigned teams. Some clearly made larger breakthroughs than others. A key to being successful with logo sketches involves narrowing down qualities that you want the logo to communicate. You might want to accentuate the roots of the city and downplay the actual mascot; or vice versa. Does the logo need a basketball or baseball in it? What kind of promotional items do you envision this logo being etched on? All these questions will eventually be answered during this process. Often times, creatives aren’t having fun with the projects and therefore the work suffers. Your quality of work reflects the joy you had in the creative process.

There’s a long way to go, so it’ll be interesting to see how these sketches develop into something concrete.

See more after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been spending some time at Nike’s 7ON High School Football tournament here in Beaverton, OR and I happened to run across this helmet in a product display cases.

Can someone explain this logo? Is it the new Arizona Cardinals logo? Did the Cardinals pull off a re-re-brand? Is this a college team logo that I haven’t seen before? Who knows more about this thing?

Nevertheless, it’s super-clean and if this happens to be a new look for the Arizona Cardinals, I’m all for it.

We just created some letterpressed business cards with our good friends at Red Bird Ink in historic Conyers! We’ll have a video of the process coming soon!