HJ Mintek - Seattle Storm

In collaboration with Ambar de Kok-Mercado

Seattle's professional basketball team needed a rebrand for stronger presence, and a new marketing campaign to drive ticket sales and encourage greater enthusiasm for their team. Our rebrand includes a client creative brief, inspiration boards, a brand standards book, logo designs and standards, team uniform designs, an advertising strategy and design for print and digital display, a non-profit partnership proposal with splash page, merchandise collateral, and stadium seating plans with on-brand environmental placemaking concepts.

We focussed on creating a brand character that highlights the strength, talent, and teamwork of the Storm. It was crucial to express power and skill and downplay any notion that pits "women's athletics" as less than men's. The Storm branding needed to exemplify that the players are top tier professional athletes.

The logo is designed off of the concept of forces of weather and nature. We drew inspiration from the idea of the team being like a tsunami crashing onto the court with fierce power. A dragon became the character of the tsunami, with intense and dramatic energy. The logo needed to have a bold color palette and border treatment that allows it to pop against a white or black background. Sports team logos often get displayed at an impressive range of sizes, from web favicons up to full billboards, so we designed the logo to be expressive and powerful regardless of the end size.

We created a secondary optional square design since the logo needs to adapt to many platforms, display sizes, and marketing collateral.

Logo rules were defined to prevent misinterpretation of brand and to keep uniformity across all collateral.

The new advertising campaign is designed to highlight the impressive skill of the Storm players and express their intense focus in the moment on court. Ambar and I worked with photographer Taylor Feist to create stunning action blur imagery that made our campaign come to life.