Previously, I began revamping the RRSN logo into Blender so I could update our broadcast ID used by our East-Chicago sportscasters. This undertaking spun off the Basketball Replay Video effort I started, and became a website-wide refresh of many different assets on the RRSN.com website.
I wanted a really solid process for bringing text into blender since environments, procedural shaders, hard surface modeling all make a lot of sense to me, where things fall apart is how blender natively handles text, which is at east counter intuitive to the ways I’ve managed typography in Adobe Illustrator and Indesign for the last 20 years.
The RRSN logo project solidified a viable workflow which spread into creating 3D logos for our major sports partners in the region, and with any luck I can streamline it further to create assets for every high school and college in the conferences we respectively cover.
Adhering to the styleguides and conventions of our clients while creating something entirely new in Tony’s case required that I actually exercise my graphic designer muscles. It required that I reverse engineer the Bethel logo’s typeface for letters I haven’t seen. It needed to unequivocally align his broadcast to his role within the BU athletics department. It had to also visually cohere to the 3D logo assets I’d been pumping out over the last two weeks for our other schools and properties.
I was missing the letters N, A, I, which I had to build from scratch from context clues of the existing images. I also took liberties with the angle of the flare of the T’s crossbar descending strokes by inverting them since, T in NATALI is optically centered and becomes more of a focal point in his logo than in the official logo for Bethel Pilots.
After converting all the elements to geometry blender would appreciate, and bringing over materials I had developed for the Bethel 3D model, iterations on adding his mugshot to the logo were attempted until settling on the finalized version:
