Game Respect Game

A. ABOUT

Before finding graphic design, a passion I dove deep into during my collegiate experience, I grew up committing all of my time to playing competitive soccer. Soccer took up my everyday extracurricular life, consumed 90% of my childhood summers, and was always in the back of my mind when thinking about my collegiate future. Towards the end of my high school experience, I began to loathe this intense commitment I made to a sport that kept me from exploring my many other interests (such as design). I eventually decided that I did not want to continue a collegiate recruiting process because I wanted more free time in college so that I could explore these other interests of mine. In retrospect, I really grew to hate playing this sport by the time I was a high school senior, which in turn caused me to totally shy away from it all of college. However, now that I am reaching the end of my college experience, I would like to shed some appreciation for the sport that helped raise me.

There are limited connections that are as special as an athletic team. A team can motivate an individual to go beyond their limits, a team can support an individual while they are at their weakest, and a team can provide complete understanding just through mutually shared experience. I cannot speak on the behalf of a male athletic team dynamic, but I’ve truly experienced some of the most beautiful bonds amongst my female soccer teams. With that being said, what if I did continue my route down collegiate soccer? Would I be able to play professional soccer? Would I be trying out for teams and attending recruitment camps right now? Would I become a professional female soccer player who eventually needs another part-time job in order to make ends meet?

The fight for equality in professional female soccer is alive and present. Many female soccer teams are currently fighting for better contracts, higher pay, and higher quality facilities. This is a problem that many professional men teams do not face. Male Club football teams gross the majority of their income from sponsors. These sponsors and teams sign contracts with each other, and the sponsor pays the team pay an absurd amount of money per year in order to advertise their company’s logo on the prime real estate of the club’s soccer jersey. Players wear these jerseys during each match, fans buy these jerseys and wear them with pride, and companies continue to get advertisements that move on two feet and are seen by thousands. Sponsorships are one of the many advantages that professional male soccer players have over professional female soccer players, but instead of focusing on all that, I would rather focus on the beauty behind the shared sport experience. The beauty behind the bonds of a female athletic team. The beauty behind women fighting together on the field for the game, while simultaneously fighting together off the field for equal treatment outside of the game. I will look at protests and people that have inspired change to unequal systems, I will explore the medium of attire to advertise messages, and I will exlplore specific movements themselves that have utilized attire as their pivotal marketing platform.

B. PAST WORK

i. HIDDEN CONCRETE JUNGLES

During the Spring of 2018 while I was studying in Venice, Italy, I made a publication project titled ‘Hidden Concrete Jungles’. I developed a publishing house from the ground up called ‘In The Paint’, which publishes books that focus on basketball culture, events, and players. I developed the publishing company’s logo, brand guidelines, first three book covers, and its first coffee table book. The coffee table book titled, ‘Hidden Concrete Jungles’ contains pictures and research of unique basketball courts found around the world. The project was inspired by several courts that I stumbled upon while residing in Italy and while traveling to other European cities. The finished product was a perfect bound 8’’ x 10’’ one hundred page publication.

ii. TO PROTEST? OR TO DISRESPECT?

The purpose of this project was to create a design installation that invokes social commentary. I chose to focus on the national debate about athletes kneeling during the national anthem. Current free agent and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, started this movement over two years ago in order to bring attention to social injustices surrounding public official’s treatment of African Americans. Kaepernick’s movement sparked this national debate due to people’s reactions to his actions. Some people feel that the act of kneeling during the national anthem greatly disrespect’s the nation and people who serve for the nation. Other people greatly admire Kaepernick’s sense of pride and protest.

I portrayed my installation through a stencil of Kaepernick kneeling with the type “To Protest? Or To Disrespect?” surrounding him. I spray painted this stencil on the pages of the Boston Globe sports pages and tiled them into a coordinated layout. I made two versions of the same layout and installed them in two of the most famous sports neighborhoods in Boston. The first installation was outside of Fenway Park (home of the Boston Red Sox) and the second was outside of TD Garden (home of the Boston Celtics).

iii. HOW DID YOU GET INTO COLLEGE?

Based on a podcast episode from ‘This American Life’ titled “How did I get into college?” I explored how the average 4th year college student could reflect on how they got into their school. I created a booklet, a website, and an installation. The booklet directly pulls quotes from the podcast, which describes an immigrant look back upon his childhood and how one person he met by chance altered his fate and allowed him to get into Harvard and then live a successful “American Dream” life. I then designed and developed the website, which includes a form that asks users to articulate how they think they got into college.

I sent out the website to many college students from universities around Boston and collected these student’s answers in an archive. Students’ answers ranged from short to long; from “I have no idea” to “I was recruited to play a sport.” The results made it clear that all of the answers, despite the array of universities, were pretty similar. I put some of these archived answers on the website and then organized a select group of the answers into a text block which I then screen printed onto the back of t-shirts of four different prestigious universities in Boston.

These universities included Boston University, Northeaster, MIT, and Harvard. Attached to the shirts was also a price tag of the yearly tuition at each school… insinuating that each school costs about the same amount and accepts students for similar reasons. I installed and displayed each shirt by hanging them from a ceiling and looking into a mirror with the question looking “How did you get into college?” at whoever looked into the mirror. The t-shirts dangled, allowing the viewer to see the 360 degree display of them.

In retrospect, the results could have been different I did this same project at a different college and if I selected students from a wider range of colleges. For example, what if we took this installation to city colleges, state schools, or grad programs… how would the results differ? Do types of schools or even tuition costs effect how people think they got into college? For a final page on the website, I then raised the “what next?” question and other questions there.

C. INSPO

I have collected a set of 36 pieces of inspiration that relate to my thesis project and just relate to me as a person/artist in general. I separated these 36 inspirations into four categories: artists (yellow & blue), movements/protests(yellow & orange), celebrities/athletes/politicians (pink & green), and establishments/ businesses (pink & blue). I decided that the best way to translate all this information into a book format that related to my thesis topic would be to make a trading card booklet. Trading card booklets are a tradition in the professional sports fan world. Fans collect trading cards of specific athletes and then trade these cards with other people in order to build up a collection of admirable cards. I’ve always been very inspired by vintage NBA trading cards and collected them myself as a child because the colors, typography, and information itself intrigued me. So I started by doing my research, found 36 pieces of individual inspiration, made design iterations of what I wanted the cards to look like, and then color coordinated every trading card according to which category each topic fit into. These trading cards live in a trading card binder in alphabetical order, acting as an A-Z thesis inspiration dictionary. Some examples of the trading cards can be seen below: