NFL DRAFT ‘22 - LAS VEGAS
designer, style guide development & application, illustrator
NFL Draft ‘22 is the league’s #2 event behind the Super Bowl. The pandemic once again presented us with some interesting challenges. The ‘20 Draft was designed to be in Vegas, but quickly needed to shift to an online event. Two years later we are back in Vegas and we were asked to reimagine the largly unused style guide in a brand new, yet familar way. A task easier said than done! We leaned hard into the electric lights of Vegas, and this idea of spectical and illusion that’s unique to the city. It yielded itself to some fun design elements, patterns, a full M.C. Escher style tessilation, and of course playing cards. The tessilation in particular was a welcome challenge I haven’t done since highschool art class.
Playing Cards are a no brainer for a place like Vegas. But they turned into kind of a crazy undertaking when you multiply a deck by 32 teams. To help me with this I worked with another illustrator to develop the mascot based Ace of Spades cards for each team, but the rest of the suits were up to me to fill out. I chose player prospects to be Kings, and Queens & Jacks to be coaches and refs. So proud of the result!
Neon Vector Logos are the last main piece of the Vegas puzzle. Once I worked out the main logo, and proved to myself vector neon was doable, everything else just fell into place. It was incredibly fulfilling to get to see them blown up large and see how well they printed at large scale.
