Description
Retro marketing has become a heavily utilized and effective brand strategy for sport teams, leagues, and related brands. Sport marketers have found a multitude of avenues to utilize retro marketing while reminding their consumers of the team’s past and capitalizing on their nostalgic feelings. Dr. Zach Scola and Dr. Brian Gordon found that sport teams utilize retro marketing practices across five areas: Imagery, Merchandising, Venue, Game Day Promotions, and Advertising. This website provides the most up-to-date examples of retro marketing in sport across the major professional sports leagues as well as intercollegiate athletics (Home, retrosportsbrands.com).
Andrew Cadle began working with Dr. Gordon on this project as an independent study during the spring semester of his senior year at the University of Kansas in 2022. Cadle graduated from the KU in 2022 with a BFA Design, Visual Communications. Cadle's passion for sports and digital product design, paired with Dr. Gordon's vision of a Retro Sports Brands database led to the manifestation of Dr. Gordon's dream becoming a reality through this website. As the project progressed, Cadle began to write the research portion for teams in the National Hockey League. The graphic below depicts the major screens one would come across when navigating this site. After that, the process of this project are listed in order by most recent, so scroll down to see the foundation of this website.
Date: Jan 21, 2022
Client: Independent Study with Dr. Brian Gordon
Medium: Digital Product Design, Sports Marketing
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Charlotte Hornets utilize retro sport brands.
Sunday, May 1, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Boston Red Sox utilize retro sport brands.
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Baltimore Orioles and Denver Nuggets utilize retro sport brands.
Saturday, April 23, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Boston Celtics utilize retro sport brands.
Friday, April 22, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Brooklyn Nets utilize retro sport brands.
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Today I updated the retro brands showcase on the landing page using a list Dr. Gordon sent me.
Monday, April 18, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Atlanta Braves and Dallas Mavericks utilize retro sport brands.
Friday, April 15, 2022
On Wednesday, I mentioned how we ran into page height issues and had come up with solutions. A few weeks ago when we discovered the max page limit of 100, one of our solutions was to divide the leagues up into their respective conferences, so we circled back to that idea in terms of splitting up the amount of teams per page to aid in avoiding the page height limit. After reorganizing the navigation for each league, I adjusted the layout of the research back to the original style that Dr. Gordon and I liked best.
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Arizona Diamondbacks and Atlanta Hawks utilize retro sport brands.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Last night, I had a random thought wondering if there was a maximum page height, similarly to how there was a maximum page limit per site. There is, and it's 60,000 pixels, which sounds like a lot, but then I divided that between 32 (most amount of teams a league has) and that lends each teams section to 1,875 pixels at most. Of the current teams that I've entered into the site, each of their sections were over 4,000 pixels each, multiple that by 32 and it equals 128,000 pixels, more than double what the limit is.
That being said, I reworked how the research will be formatted. I looked at blog postings and image galleries, and settled on the galleries due to some difficulties with setting up separate blogs for each league. Below is how the Arizona Cardinals section, and all other teams will eventually be laid out to accommodate the maximum height limit.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Atlanta Falcons utilize retro brands to their section under the NFL.
Friday, April 8, 2022
Since the English Premier League's teams change every season, I added the league's 20 most popular teams throughout the history of the league.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Today I added SEC, Big 10, Big 12, ACC, and Pac 12 conference logos to the brands page and each conference's respective school logos to their pages.
Monday, April 4, 2022
Today I added the research for how the Arizona Cardinals utilize retro brands to their section under the NFL.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
National Hockey League and Major League Baseball teams have been added to their respective league page in alphabetical order.
Friday, March 11, 2022
Major League Soccer and National Football League teams have been added to their respective league page in alphabetical order.
Friday, February 25, 2022
Over the course of the last week and a half, I ran into a potentially big issue for how Dr. Gordon and I had originally planned to format the website. Our original plan was for each team in every league to have their own page that the user is directed to when a team's logo is clicked. Regardless of your subscription, Wix has a limit of 100 pages, and each sport league averages around 30 teams. I met with Dr. Gordon about this issue and provided what I thought was the best solution. My solution was instead of being sent to a new page when a team's logo is clicked, you're navigated to an anchor on a the same page where that respective's team research starts. This also keeps all the teams on one page, allowing site visitors to continually scroll to find other teams, instead of needing to go back and forth between different teams and their respective pages.
After that issue was resolved, I shrinked the team logos to fit within the landing area, and then linked each team's logo to an anchor that leads to their specific part of the page. The image below is the NBA's updated team page, with the template for the Atlanta Hawks' section.
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Today I finished a draft of the landing page animation. Once I'm given more retro logos, I will replace each teams current logos with their respective retro logo from the major sports leagues in the United States.
Friday, February 11, 2022
In this weeks meeting, Dr. Gordon and I discussed how a lot of the research is still in progress at this point, and won't be ready to be uploaded until after Spring Break. We agreed that between now and then, I should build out the rest of the league pages with team logos and setting up each teams respective pages with correct URLs, links, and other SEO settings. The next few entries into this page will be me building out the NFL, NHL, MLB, MLS, and WNBA pages in a similar manner of the NBA page below.
Monday, January 31, 2022
I updated the layout for the Milwaukee Bucks page and input the research, images, and references that the professor provided. We wanted the layout and flow of the team pages to read like an online news article, where the text and photos interacted with one another in stream, rather than a 1-to-1 format like in the rough draft example from January 25. For other teams, if images are not readily available, I will have to contact team representatives for those resources.
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
I edited the home page color and layout as well as formatted a grayscale/color hover animation for the league and team logos.
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Today I setup the brands, league, NBA, and Milwaukee Bucks pages as well as optimizing each of those for mobile use.
Saturday, January 22, 2022
I setup the main navigation, header, home page design, footer, and color and type themes. For the image carousel on the home page, I used placeholder images that still relate to the research topic. The color palette was Dr. Gordon's lone non-negotiable because since he had the vision for this project over the past few years, he's always wanted his brand to feature the Boston Red Sox font but with the retro San Diego Padres color way.
