Champions Celebrate
Done in: 2012 for Scott County Booster
What the client needed
The Scott County Kentucky bowling team won the 2012 state championship. Needless to say, folks in Scott County thought there should be something commemorative, and they approached a local company to create a shirt.
The school’s logo is the cardinal and it is incredibly close in looks to the University of Louisville Cardinal mascot. Mascots are great, especially in terms of establishing on ongoing brand personality. If that mascot is repeatedly associated with positive experiences, the mascot becomes iconic for that set of memories. Reinforced long enough, the familiar becomes the historic and can even move on to veneration. Scott county has a long, and well loved sports tradition.
My part of the project
My job was to associate that tradition (a personality actually) with an emerging sport that had done extremely well for it’s first year out. My thought was that two things were important, (1) a fresh take on typical bowling ephemera (2) a connection with the school’s logo, (and hence their tradition), without being seen as “redoing the logo.”
Rather than repeat the kitsch solution of bowling ball through bowling pins I pushed the concept of connecting a well-established logo with the emerging sport of bowling at Scott County High. The snarling look on Scott County’s cardinal was the brand personality I brought across. The notion of aggressive as a visual adjective morphed into a bowling ball face
