Kansas City Dreamers (NBA Expansion Concept)

[maxwasson]

Over the past couple of months, there have been some wonderful concepts and ideas for a hypothetical NBA expansion team in Kansas City, Missouri, and I decided to put my own spin on it, with the "Kansas City Dreamers", now why did I choose Dreamers?, Well I've always had an idea for a Kansas City sports-team name based on the early animation history in Kansas City that started at the Laugh-O-Gram Studios building on East 31st Street, and I decided to go with "Dreamers" as a nickname to harken back to the early days of Disney and Warner Bros. The mascot for the team is a chinchilla which is a type of mouse, and it's name is Ubo the Chinchilla named after Kansas City-born animator Ub Iwerks who worked alongside Walt Disney in Kansas City and was instrumental in co-creating Mickey Mouse. 

 

BRANDING

 

The logo and wordmarks were a Fiverr commission, and I wasn't able to identify the font used in the wordmarks, but for the insignia logos and jersey numbers I used Mickorama. The color scheme is blue, red, and vanilla, in which the blue and red are meant to resemble the colors of Kansas City's brand new flag but also the city's former NBA franchise; the Kansas City Kings and the nearby Kansas Jayhawks of the NCAA. 

 

EXTRA SCRIPT, INSIGNIA, AND PRIMARY MARKS

I of course designed a ton of extra logo assets for this concept (You know me)

 

COURTS

 

This is the standard home court design which features a lot of local(ish) sponsors plus the wordmark logo on both sides of the court

 

 

And here is the "City Edition" court with a vanilla and black color scheme made to resemble the color scheme of the cartoons made in the era where western animation got its start and its also features the Kansas City skyline on the bottom

 

UPDATE: Made some small tweaks to the court to make things more centered, and reflective of the more recent courts I've designed

 

UNIFORMS

Here is the uniform set I designed, the home and away uniforms are very reminiscent of the old Kansas City Kings home/away set, and the red and black alternates I took inspiration from some of the Los Angeles Clippers sets, and the "City Edition" uniforms matches the "City Edition" court design.

 

UPDATE: I fixed an oversight with the naming of the black alternate uniform and changed the jersey manufacturer from Adidas to Nike, since that's what every NBA team has. 

 

REJECTED LOGOS

 

To close out this concept, here are some logos that didn't make the cut, plus the initial design that I got from Fiverr, which the mascot here just looks more like a standard chinchilla. 

 

This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, and of course critiques and comments are welcome!

[Wildcomet]

Once I read the history behind it (really interesting, did not know a lot of that), a good sized part of me really loves this idea and design, but a small part of me wonders if it's too "Disney" for the modern NBA. It feels like something that would have fit in amazingly well in that 90's era of the Magic, Angels, Mighty Ducks all embracing their Disney connections, but it could be a bit out of place today. Or it could be a welcome renaissance; I wish those teams would go back to those looks generally haha.

 

Those thoughts aside, I do really enjoy how the logo embraces that 1920's proto-Mickey Mouse style of art, and the city edition uses those old time cartoon colors. The one thing I can critique is that the wordmark is a bit hard for me to read on the Home jersey, maybe try it without the outline? The letters being a bit thinner may make the difference. Overall really nice!

[maxwasson]

27 minutes ago, Wildcomet said:

Once I read the history behind it (really interesting, did not know a lot of that), a good sized part of me really loves this idea and design, but a small part of me wonders if it's too "Disney" for the modern NBA. It feels like something that would have fit in amazingly well in that 90's era of the Magic, Angels, Mighty Ducks all embracing their Disney connections, but it could be a bit out of place today. Or it could be a welcome renaissance; I wish those teams would go back to those looks generally haha.

 

Those thoughts aside, I do really enjoy how the logo embraces that 1920's proto-Mickey Mouse style of art, and the city edition uses those old time cartoon colors. The one thing I can critique is that the wordmark is a bit hard for me to read on the Home jersey, maybe try it without the outline? The letters being a bit thinner may make the difference. Overall really nice!

 

Yeah if you wanna learn about Kansas City's role in early animation history, I recommend checking out the "Thank You, Walt Disney" project that is aiming to turn the currently abandoned Laugh-O-Grams Studio building into an animation museum. Thank You Walt Disney

[VampyrRabbit]

Love the wordmarks and the colours. The drawing of the mascot is good too, though I don't know why it's a South American rodent, and calling it a type of mouse is like calling a Giraffe a type of deer - Chinchillas are much more closely related to guinea pigs and capybaras than they are to mice.  I'd call the mascot after a local name for a ground squirrel rather than a Chinchilla.

The main uniforms are okay, but I think you could have done a lot more with the blue, red and vanilla colors rather than just going with the one color armhole and collar trim and solid side panels. The city edition is nice but probably would be banned from use for the same reason the Bucks and Philly had their cream uniforms banned (digital ad interferance).

 Overall though, this is a really cool concept with great logos, just the uniforms need a bit of work.

[maxwasson]

47 minutes ago, VampyrRabbit said:

Love the wordmarks and the colours. The drawing of the mascot is good too, though I don't know why it's a South American rodent, and calling it a type of mouse is like calling a Giraffe a type of deer - Chinchillas are much more closely related to guinea pigs and capybaras than they are to mice.  I'd call the mascot after a local name for a ground squirrel rather than a Chinchilla.

The main uniforms are okay, but I think you could have done a lot more with the blue, red and vanilla colors rather than just going with the one color armhole and collar trim and solid side panels. The city edition is nice but probably would be banned from use for the same reason the Bucks and Philly had their cream uniforms banned (digital ad interferance).

 Overall though, this is a really cool concept with great logos, just the uniforms need a bit of work.

 

Digital ad inteference? What does that mean?

 

Thanks for the critique, this was first time doing NBA uniforms for a concept, I am going to translate this concept into NBA 2K sometime and I could maybe design better uniforms there. 

[VampyrRabbit]

45 minutes ago, maxwasson said:

 

Digital ad inteference? What does that mean?

Basically, the cream and the hardwood being so close together in color means that on TV, you get the same sort of effect as this when a player goes over a digital ad.

 

Small amounts of the color are okay, but with digital ads, cream uniforms are history in the NBA.

[maxwasson]

I have made some tweaks to the uniforms, one of them requested by @Wildcomet, I have changed the home uniform's script logo from the blue and red to just a plain blue logo and a plain blue jersey number, the road jersey number's colors have been swapped to be more accurate to the Kansas City Kings' old road uniforms, and I've changed the waistline colors for the red alternate jersey from red to blue as they keep the color continuity with the blue jersey/shorts stripe on the red alternate. 

 

EDIT: I decided to update the shorts on the Dreamers uniforms to be more accurate to present-day regulation style NBA shorts.

[Zerovoltz]

I like the history and think the mascot logo is really good!  Really like the cream and black city editioncs.  As someone else mentioned, the HOME "Dreamers" is hard to read.  Also...personally, I am not a fan of light blue and red as a color combo..that's just me....I only think that combo looks good on the old Houston Oilers.  Just a personal preference.  I'd like the cream and black as the primaries.  Only other complaint is the mascot on the shorts.  Put it on the jersey instead.