Hey Patrick, great to see you applying yourself to progressing your skills and talents, always good to see. Looking forward to your eventual series.

The best advice I can give is research, research, research. Everything you do will feel more authentic if you put in the time on researching everything from that era. Even if you don't follow the "mothership" (MLB) exactly, it will still feel close because you've gotten the flavor of the era correct.

Dressed To The Nines is a great site for baseball uniform references.

As Bob Ross said, "it's your world" but you also want to make it feel real. I use the big leagues as a loose guideline for my projects, whether it's MLB or the NHL, etc. So if teal didn't exist in the baseball world in the 40's or 50's then it'd probably feel weird if I suddenly had a bright teal colored team. I've personally found that darker shades and hues of colors tend to feel less modern. Your blues and reds will be fine, but the accent colors such as yellow/gold are the ones you want to really tweak. A VERY handy tool is a color picker in your internet browser (you can find add-ons or plugins in most) that will allow you to sample colors from references pictures. Or you can import a photo/etc into your graphics program and do it that way.

Another thing to watch for: FONTS. In my opinion fonts can make or break a project more so than color or other design elements. You want to be tasteful. Not every team had some Old English script or some wild swooshy hand drawn lettering look. Many did though, so you have to be creative in finding fonts/styles that work for the era and also have some difference in your other logo identities.

This also goes for jersey numbers. One thing that really turns me off to projects is usage of jersey number styles that don't fit the era. You can be more repetitive here. Half the teams in your league could be using a very similar number choice because there were fewer choices back then.

For baseball in particular, it's unique for the lettered cap logos that have persisted to this day. Those are somewhat iconic pieces of baseball history. So you want to make sure those are good looking and have a timeless feel. (Like the Dodgers who basically haven't changed since they moved to LA) Along that same line, baseball can be more of a slow-moving project design-wise because especially in the older eras their looks didn't change over quite as much.

I used the Saline template for my previous baseball series, it's a pretty straight-forward template. I use Photoshop though. More so than the template, you'll want to put some thought into your display template/style; ie how you're going to present your designs. I take lots of ideas from other people's series and then craft them into something that works for me.

ThisIsFine wrote:

I went and created some color swatches for the teams; It’s mostly shades of navy and blue. One of them is basically U Miami colors, and I had to revise one of the yellows because I thought it looked too greenish, but other then that, I think I did pretty good. (Will not post image to avoid giving away team identity details)

Also, about team presentation, I will take your template is inspiration.

I also wanted to mention: If you need any graphic design advice before posting, feel free to shoot me a PM and I'll be happy to take a look and give some feedback confidentially.

ThisIsFine wrote:

So, here are some color swatches.
https://i.imgur.com/LNRYYxV.jpg

Hey man, I somehow missed this before. The color swatches look good. Hope to see some concepts soon. You can always post a concept or two before launching the series to get some feedback. We're here to help!