A Slamdunk Design for Dunktown Podcast!

4 min readOct 31, 2018

Geeeeet ready for a bunch of basketball puns!

Friends-of-Duck-Brigade Agata and Anastasia are two smart, funny people who wanted to launch a basketball podcast for people who love basketball but don’t love the boring stuff — stats, numbers, stodgy old announcer guys.

And Duck Brigade (Gabe and I) are two people who wanted to help them launch their podcast.

In our mission to assist, Gabe took care of producing, recording, setting up the studio, developing the website, publishing the podcast, helping with name and content brainstorming, and cooking oatmeal for early-morning podcast recording sessions.

And all I had to take care of was the design.

But that’s no easy layup necessarily! It requires some preparation and fancy footwork.

Here are the steps we took…

Step 0.5 | Discussion

First, I talked to Agata and Anastasia about their hopes and dreams for the logo design.

They knew they wanted illustrated versions of themselves in the art, so I immediately got in touch with my trusty illustrator + designer pal, Laura Gros, to collaborate with me on that component.

Step 1 | Moodboards

Next, I pulled a bunch of reference in Pinterest.

Some examples of reference:

The Dunktown team came back with excellent feedback. They’d pulled the reference they responded to most, which included illustration style, typography style, and an overall vintage-y vibe:

Wow, great, the Dunktown team are really setting me up for a logo slamdunk with that moodboards feedback.

I pulled probably 30–40 pieces of reference, and they narrowed it down to 6.

That is super helpful for a designer! I knew that if I integrated the feeling and components of these preferred elements, I’d deliver something close to what they wanted.

Step 2 | Design Exploration

My next step is to dive into playing around with different logos, all springboarding off of the above reference.

I delivered these options for the first round of design:

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

The Dunktown team again made a strategic play with their feedback — they consulted together and sent super specific, consolidated notes.

Step 3 | Design Refinement

Overall, the team responded to Version 1 the most. Their change requests included color palette updates, typography refinement, adding in their names, and including the torsos in the illustrations.

So we ended up with something a little like this (actually, exactly like this)…

Final Dunktown Logo!