wait, are you telling me it's been almost three and a half months since I've posted something that wasn't an alt league graphic? someone should do something about that
I think it's often helpful to find opinions on sports design that come from people who don't really care about it. This can sometimes be a challenge, because they don't really care about it. Nonetheless, I find that "normie" opinions (ew, cringe) help to contextualize a lot of the design conversations we have and can help frame these discussions, especially when their opinions differ from ours. After all, sports teams - and businesses at large - only care about pandering to the greatest common denominator, and is always going to listen to an average person more than one of us nerds when it comes to design, even if we do objectively have better taste than them, because we're cooler and smarter and sexier.
And sometimes a team screws it up so badly that literally not a single person likes what they've created.
It's been a while since it happened, but I still remember how weird it was when the Utah Jazz rebranded last year and everybody and their mother was talking about how bad it was. Even much later, after the unveiling was old news, I would still occasionally see things like that one meme of the "worst possible NBA player" that played on just how bad everyone thinks the Jazz uniforms are. So with that in mind, I wanted to answer a simple question: is there anything I can salvage from something so unilaterally despised?
This is probably definitely, 100% the most effort I've put into one of these so far, because I knew I had to justify the change somehow. And I figured, if they've decided they're black and yellow now, why not go fully into a rebrand and change the logo too? This was a bad idea in terms of getting something out in a reasonable amount of time but this series has never been on a schedule to begin with, so it's fine. Fortunately for me, there already happens to be a thing that is a) highly associated with jazz music b) is already the correct colors and c) looks quite a bit like the letter J:
Now I'm not the first person to think of this, but rest assured that this was an original idea and that I have in fact been sitting on my ass for over four months not finishing this design, and I hope you'll agree that this is at least a slightly different take on things. Regardless, I think this set of uniforms stays pretty true to the direction the Jazz apparently wanted to go while still giving them, idk, any amount of an identity? The only other thing I really changed were the stupid, butt-ugly gray side panels, which I've replaced with an actual contrasting color (and also hidden a super-secret music-related easter egg that you can only find if your IQ is over 2,000).
I'm curious to know what you think, so be sure to like and subscribe so you never miss a new video!