Hello,
My name is Peter Kopperud. I am a 20yr old graphic designer from Wisconsin who is extremely passionate about sports graphic design. I currently attend the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse and I have been working as a designer for about 5 years now.
This is my first post and I wanted to share a fun project I've been working on. I'm a huge baseball fan and every year for intramural softball I create jersey designs for our team to vote on. Once they've voted I will create these jerseys myself for the team to wear. Here are some examples of jerseys I did a couple years ago.
To preface, this was all done as a personal portfolio project to showcase my ability to take a project from concept to product and it was just a blast to do. Now, I will add that unfortunately I've really grown to dislike this design. For a number of reasons. Firstly, it feels extremely unoriginal to me. I came up with around 10 unique jersey options for the team that year and I guess it should be no surprise that this killer color combo won the vote. Because let's be honest, it looks great when the St. Louis Cardinals sport it. which if you couldn't tell, it draws inspiration from. Furthermore, it is so basic, I felt it really didn't give me a chance to really go buck wild and show off some illustration capabilities and brand design understanding if a potential employer saw the project. Regardless it was a good jumping point, as now in the third year of doing this project annually, the scale and depth has grown considerably.
This year, I spent more time coming focusing on a solid, unique, creative, and fun 4-6 designs instead of 10 or so basic ones. Each of the proposed designs had to incorporate something about the area (La Crosse WI) or showcase a strong brand consciousness. Eventually our team came to the consensus that we wanted to be the La Crosse Squirrels. On the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse campus, the Squirrels are not only abundant but extremely fierce. Having been so desensitized to the chaos that ensues in a college town, especially one that hosts one of the biggest US Oktoberfest celebrations annually, we felt they were the perfect mascot for our team. It incorporates a lot of really thoughtful details and has some super fun but classic looking cream jerseys. This year in particular I ordered sublimated full button up jerseys unlike the t shirt jerseys of years prior. But that being said, I still made a ton of extra apparel available for my team to purchase for the season. The bit shown below is merely a quarter of the merchandise I created for teammates to purchase. There are about 6 other fully branded unique team concepts that I have tucked away alongside hundreds of other projects I've worked on that I hope to post in the future. For now I hope you enjoy, I will post pictures of the real jerseys the second I have them in my hands. Thanks so much - Pete
