99% Invisible - 311- The Barney Design

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

Until the early 90s, basketball uniforms were pretty tame. There had been real limits to what could be done with jerseys. All the details—the numbers, the names, the logos—had to be sewed on. Complicated graphics would have taken a massive amount of embroidery, which would have added additional weight and made the jersey hotter to wear. But dye sublimation changed everything. Sublimation is a process of printing dye directly into the fabric. Now for the first time, you could design something in Photoshop, and make it as big and colorful as you wanted. Then with sublimation, you could print that design straight onto the material without any embroidery or extra weight. This allowed NBA teams to go wild…and they did…which led to one of the most famous love-it-or-hate-it basketball jersey, the 1996 Toronto Raptors’ “Barney Uniform.” The Barney Design

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On a March afternoon in 1996, a Toronto Raptors, a brand new team in the NBA at the time, were playing the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls were the best team in the league, and the Raptors were pretty terrible. 36,000 fans showed up that day, and the Raptors actually beat the Bulls. But it was a mostly meaningless game at the end of the season. This is Reporter Whitney Jones. And what's so interesting to me about this game isn't who won or how the teams played.

But the way they looked, there's the Bulls who are just classic NBA. They've had the same logos since 1966. They're wearing their red-awaited jerseys that look basically like every Chicago Bulls jersey ever. It's red with the word bulls written across the front and black and white lettering. It's simple, classic. But then, there's the Toronto Raptors. The team is wearing their white home uniforms, which have jagged silver and black pinstripes as if they were cut

by slashing Raptor claws, and then across the whole front, there's a giant red basketball playing dinosaur, who himself is wearing sneakers and a uniform, a totally different uniform, and he's dribbling a basketball. And that was just their home uniform. The road jerseys that year were even more fun. They were bright purple. All of this, including the Raptor's name, had been inspired by the velociraptors in the wildly successful movie Jurassic Park. But these jerseys got compared to a different, much friendlier 90s dinosaur. That's now known as the Barney design because they're road uniform as purple. This is Paul Lucas, uniform obsessive and writer of a column at ESPN called UniWatch. It just, it looks so cartoonish and so ridiculous.

You look at it and it's like really? That's a professional, professional top level team. The Raptors jersey may have been particularly garish, but it wasn't the only jersey of its kind. The 90s were this insane decade of NBA uniform design that produced some of the wildest jerseys that have ever graced a basketball court. Loud, wacky designs, the likes of which had never been seen before, and haven't been seen since. Like the Atlanta Hawks read in black jersey with a fierce-looking hawk swooping in across

the entire front of it, holding a basketball in its little talons. Or the Milwaukee Bucks Green uniform with a giant picture of a purple stag. Paul Lucas called this one great. I mean, great in the sense that it was so awful, it was great. They had this purple, garish, purple and green color pattern,

and it's just ridiculous. But it definitely, all these designs, definitely, they pushed and extended the idea of what a basketball uniform could be or should be. And many of these designs can be traced back to one man. I'm Tom O'Grady. I joined the NBA in 1990 as League's first creative director. Tom grew up in Chicago, sketching and resketching the logos of his hometown Chicago Black Hawks,

another classic pro hockey teams. Tom's love for sports and eye-catching art made this new NBA gig a dream job. My first day at the NBA was just filled with excitement. I'd always been a big sports fan and I loved design and my studied graphic design here at Columbia College back in Chicago. And so when I walked in the door in June of 1990, I kind of had to pinch myself because I really didn't believe what was happening.

Before Tom O'Grady joined the league, most NBA jerseys look something like that classic bull's jersey. They had simple two or three color schemes with the team names across the league. Most NBA jerseys look something like that classic bull's jersey. They had simple two or three color schemes with the team names across the front. There might have been a stripe here or there, maybe a cool font, but that was about it. And they weren't designed by designers. The process of designing team uniforms is mostly left up to team equipment managers, because they were responsible for getting the players outfitted to play the games. Mostly this consisted of the equipment managers flipping through a catalog,

choosing a design they liked with the right colors. It was not a sophisticated business, let's say that. They were happy just to get uniforms on the players' backs. But that was all about to change because in 1988, Charlotte Hornets introduced a radical new idea, Because in 1988, the Charlotte Hornets introduced a radical new idea, the color teal. In this archival news footage from 1988, Hornets player Kelly Trapuka stands on stage in front of flashing cameras. Then he rips off his teal-terra-way warm-ups to reveal the Hornets' new uniforms. Teal was not a traditional NBA jersey color. It's not NBA red, it's not NBA blue, it's not Celtic screen, it's not Lakers yellow. Tom O'Grady had nothing to do with the T.O. Hornets uniform, but he took it as a sign

that the league was ready for bolder designs. It was kind of a leap of faith for the league to say, you know, this is not really something we've seen before, but as an expansion team, we'll probably let you have this one because maybe there's something new we can learn from this. And it turned out fans loved the teal Hornets jersey. It looked fresh and different. It was really very popular. They soon became known as the Men of Teal.

And all of a sudden, the Charlotte Hornets had gained great recognition before they'd ever played a basketball game. When Tom O'Grady was hired as the NBA's first creative director two years later in 1990, he wanted to push Jersey design even further, not just the colors, but the designs on the uniforms. Until the early 90s, there had been real limits to how wild you could get with these designs. Because all the details, the numbers, the names and the logos, had to be sewn on. To do any kind of complicated graphics, who would have taken a massive amount of embroidery,

at all that thread would have added additional weight and made the jersey hotter to wear. But soon after Tomo Grady joined the NBA, he would get some new tools to work with. Computer programs like Photoshop and Illustrator helped him dream up new logo designs. And there was a new technique to get those drawings onto a jersey. It was called die sublimation. Sublimation changed everything. Sublimation is a process of printing die

directly into the fabric. Now for the first time, you could design something in Photoshop. You could make it big and you could add up a bunch of different colors. Then with sublimation, you could basically print that design straight onto the material without any embroidery or extra weight. So it allowed us to start to take things we would never normally even consider doing

on a jersey. And we started doing more outrageous uniforms and stuff because we could. We can, so we will. Tom's first big design was for the Phoenix Suns, who were celebrating their 25th year in the league. They were moving into a new arena and they wanted a new look. So Tom met with their team owner, Jerry Calangelo.

Jerry was great, and he was a fellow Chicagoan, so as soon as you heard my accent, he's like, I think we're gonna get along. I think us Chicago guys kinda get this. Here's what I wanna do. I wanna have a logo that's gonna last for the next 25 years. I don't want to have to change it. So I want something futuristic, but classic. So Tom and his team started on the Suns redesign. They come up with this big basketball. That's also a sun. It has these long red to orange

gradient sun rays coming off of it. And then they print this in a bright purple background under their new jersey. It's not exactly what I would call classic, but it is bold. Definitely bold. As luck would have it, the Phoenix Suns made it to the NBA finals that year. And the whole country got to see that bright purple jersey, with its blazing basketball sun, all over national TV. We got exposure for that uniform that was priceless. That changed everything for us. We were able to do things with uniforms that we could not imagine even two years before that.

Like a teal Detroit Piston's jersey with a flaming horse head logo or a pinstriped Houston rocket jersey featuring a cartoon rocket with an angry face on it. Over the course of the decade, two-thirds of NBA teams got new uniforms, with new logos and new color schemes. There was a lot of teal and purple. 3D lettering and oversized graphics were everywhere. We look back on it and say, wow, this stuff is pretty outlandish, but it's okay because that's what was happening at the time.

The technology led us to go wild. And Tom's boss, NBA Commissioner David Stern, gave him the freedom to keep pushing the designs further. He said, you know, if this is what's selling and if you're telling me, this is what's going to work at retail, um, count me in. Before the 90s, the NBA wasn't doing much with merchandising. If a fan wanted to buy a jersey, they had to pay the full cost of a genuine stitched NBA game jersey, which was sometimes over $200. But with all these popular new designs, Tom and others at the NBA got thinking. Why don't we have a jersey that we can sell for about $45 to $50 that looks similar to the game jersey.

And we saw this business explode, you know, in five years. It went from almost like a baseline of nothing to a multi-million dollar business, largely in the jerseys that we were designing. The era about landage NBA uniforms reached its apex in 1995. With that jersey we talked about at the beginning, that one from Toronto.

The one that some people call the Barney design. We were told directly by the team owner at the time, John Bitov, it would like the happy meal box of uniform designs. And we kind of looked at him, and it was like, what did he mean by that? He said, I'm not gonna wear this uniform forever. Kids don't eat out of a happy meal box forever,

but if you can get the kids into your store, you're going to win them over. If happy meal design isn't a term yet, I'm making it one right now. The goal was to convince hockey loving kids in Toronto that they should care about this new basketball team. And so we created this purple uniform with these jagged edge club pen stripes that looked like a raptured common ripped it. And then they that look like a raptor come and ripped it. And then they slapped a big dinosaur right in the middle of it. And they made it red because Canada. He wanted red-raptive to represent Canada, which made all the sense in the world. I don't know how much sense that made, but that jersey it sold.

I think it was the top-selling expansion team logo we ever did even today. It sales were through the roof. Before they ever played a game, before the team had even signed a single player, the Raptors were seventh in the league in merchandise sales. But as the 90s came to an end, change was a foot, and stuff was about to get a lot more boring. By the early 2000s, the NBA had become a booming global industry, and wealthy business people were suddenly interested in team ownership.

People like Howard Schultz, who turned Starbucks into a multi-billion-dollar business. In 2001, Schultz bought the Seattle Super Sonics, and he came into the league with a whole laundry list of changes to make. He wanted to replace the hip-hop you'd hear in the arena on Game Night with Jazz. He wanted his team to stick to the fundamentals, less flashy dunks and show-boding. He favored team basketball over individual stars, which was actually really bad for his team because it pissed off their actual stars. Also Schult hated the Sonic's 90s look that had been designed by another than our pal Tom.

We were able to take this kind of basketball spinning around the space needle and kind of have this super man font and added toward Sonic's in there. And they changed the colors from green and gold to dark green, red and a metallic bronze. Old Howard Jazz instead of hip-hop shults was not a fan, so he hired Seattle design firm Hornel Anderson to completely remake the Sonic's graphic identity. That's Jersey's warm-ups, logos, everything. I get my pants, I was so damn excited. This is Andrew Wickland, who is the lead designer on the project. I hated what the Sonic's looked like at that time too, and a lot of other teams, frankly, that had been rebranded in the 90s, so yeah, it was like a candy store.

The direction they were given was clear. Immediately go back to the old classic green and gold color scheme, and do something iconic. Howard's words were, I want this to be something that nobody would ever want to change. I want it to be the Chicago Cubs, the New York Yankees, the Green Bay Packers. Those are solid shapes, simple shapes. They are simple color palettes. It's simplification. Is it strength? By the start of the 2001-2002 season, everything was in place. Green and gold, no 3D anything, no giant loggers across the chest. The uniforms looked like an update, or the ones they'd started wearing in the late 70s.

But if Howard Schultz was committed to making the Sonics an iconic franchise with an iconic look, his commitment didn't last very long. In 2006, he sold the team, and the new owners moved the Sonics to Oklahoma City. But Schultz's aesthetic vision rippled throughout the league. Throughout the odds, one team after another slowly returned to the old color schemes, and lost their big graphic jerseys. Even though Raptors' look has completely changed, this year the two main jerseys were red

and white, and they just say Raptors on the front in a This year the two main jerseys were red and white and they just say Raptors on the front in a simple font. No crazy claw marks, no dinosaurs. And it's like I've seen better inner-me-er old jerseys at college. Here is Tom O'Grady again. There's just nothing to them. There's zero, they're lifeless and I don't get it. Say what you will about Tom O'Grady's jerseys, but they were not lifeless. His designs are mostly gone from the NBA now, but they live on in blog posts and listicles of people's favorite jerseys from NBA history, or their least favorite. In their 2015 list of the ugliest basketball jerseys of all time, sports illustrated wrote, quote, Quote, the Toronto Raptors cartoon dinosaur logo is one of the worst in all of sports.

Thankfully, it will soon be extinct. But Tom doesn't mind when people call his designs garish, or even ugly. He's proud of our Raptors jersey. It was meant to be provocative, it was meant to be kind of eye-catching. We could have taken and started out with, you know, a 72-point helvetica that says Toronto in a big number on the back-and-call of the day, but I think that would not have been a memorable identity or nor a great way to introduce a new team into a new market.

And if people are still talking about it, then he did his job, right? I'm fine with the criticism about people thinking it's the worst thing ever because it certainly says that we noticed it, we have an opinion about it, we have a strong opinion about it, but we remember it and I think that's great. And the Raptor's original plan to hook kids with the happy meal of NBA jerseys. Love it or hate it, you could argue that it worked. Today Toronto has a loyal fan base, and over the past five years they've had some of the highest attendance numbers in the league.

And as for those bold 90s jerseys, they haven't actually gone extinct. There are now entire companies that produce retro jerseys and many of the designs Tom O'Grady and his team came up with are really popular. And one of the top sellers is a bright purple jersey with a jagged claw-cut pinstripes and a red dinosaur, ribbling a basketball.

Because Oakland's warriors swept the finals, this episode about basketball jerseys missed the season by just a hair, but I have good news for you. It's time for the World Cup, and we have the perfect design nerd World Cup conversation starter after this. So most major sports that involve a ball, including basketball and baseball and American football, they went through early periods in which actual ball designs varied a whole lot. But in general, the shapes and the materials and dimensions and the basic look have all become standardized over time.

You know, in the NBA, you've got a big brown ball of a certain exact size with thin black lines. Major League Baseball, there's a small white sphere made with exactly 180 double stitches of red. Exactly. And then in the NFL, everybody uses the same brown pro late spheroid with white stripes and laces along the top, inflated to a very narrow pressure range of around 13 PSI. Or you get in trouble.

Yeah, big trouble. Oh, yeah, these are carefully inspected, measured, stamped, and sequestered before the game. That is Kurt Colestad. I'm talking to his digital director. And we're going to talk about a type of ball that is a bit less consistent. It continues to change year after year. It is the soccer ball.

In 1930, at the first World Cup, the two teams competing in the final game couldn't agree on what ball to use. So FIFA actually stepped in and had them alternate between two different balls, using one team's pick for the first half and the other team's pick for the second half of the game. Going forward, FIFA ruled that there would be just one ball per competition. That makes sense. So the two balls in 1930 looked pretty similar. They looked kind of like volleyball, so it was pretty rough looking,

and you could see the laces around it, too. Yeah, and those were pretty typical for the time, and for the decades after, most balls of that period followed the same basic model. Long strips of leather stitched together into a rough sphere, most were of a single solid color, too, usually neutral browns, yellows, oranges, off whites. But the ball design I grew up with didn't look like that at all.

It was made up of this very uniform patchwork of high contrast, black and white geometric shapes. And that's the same exact ball I grew up with. That classic soccer ball that's very recognizable and basically iconic at this point. In fact, if you do an image search on the web for soccer ball icon, that's exactly what you'll find. And so how did this become the design that everyone thinks of?

Well, soccer balls first started featuring this distinctive pattern of, you know, pentagons and hexagons in the 1960s. But then it got really famous when FIFA used a version made by Adidas for the 1970 World Cup. They wanted something high contrast, so the gameplay would be easier for viewers at home to follow on black and white television screens The so-called tell star ball was an instant hit. The name tell star is a portmanteau of the words television and star Because it was meant to be the perfect soccer ball for televised games The name was borrowed from the tell star communication satellite

Which was white and spherical and had black solar panels all around it a lot of subsequent balls have continued to use the same basic approach of alternating darks and lights, but the designs have really evolved, too. Over the years, official balls went from having 32 to 14 to just eight panels or fewer in some cases. And this isn't just cosmetic. Those different number of panels actually change the function of the ball. Yeah, they affect the shape and how the ball performs on the field. They make a really big sort of structural difference. So can you tell me about this year's ball? Yeah, so this year Adidas, who, you know, they've been designing these balls since 1970,

and that famous Telstar ball, they're back again, and this time they're actually bringing back the Telstar with the Telstar 18. How similar is the Telstar 18 to the original Telstar from 1970? So it does have black and white, but this new six panel design actually also features a digital grid pattern of gray pixels that fade between the extremes. And while the original Telstar could be easily abstracted into a logo or shrunk down into an emoji, this one has too much detail for that. It seems more designed to sell the latest cool looking ball than to actually work as an icon. Right, I guess you can't make icons every single year.

Yeah, not every year. But it's crazy to me that they keep painting the design and forcing professional players to deal with different shapes and weights and aerodynamics over and over a year after year. That's crazy to me. Yeah, it's been a big source of controversy too. Ahead of these World Cup competitions, some players complain about having to figure out how the latest new ball will actually behave on the field.

And it kind of makes you wonder if FIFA should just stick to one basic uniform structural design. Right. Like, figure out what the best geometry and materials, and then you can make superficial changes that change the look, but don't change the actual function of the ball. But meanwhile, for better or worse, there are a lot of different designs out there, and you can see a ton of them on our website. It's at 99pi.org. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Whitney Jones and Emmett Fitzgerald. Whitney is the host of the show Pitch, whose next season is coming out on Audible at the

end of this month on June 29th. Our Mix and Tech production was by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Rial. Senior producer Katie Mangle and Joe Rosenberg handled the editing. The rest of the team is Digital Director Kurt Colstead, Senior Editor to Lany Hall, Avery Trouffman, Vivian Lee, Taren Mazet, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown, confetti-streamreen Oakland, California. 99% Infosible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows and all of podcasting.

Fun more at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But I have a few follow-up episodes for you. If you want to really geek out about sports uniforms, find episode 111 featuring Paul Lucas of UniWatch and Jesse Thorn of NPR's Bullseye talking about baseball, Hozary. Seriously, it's great.

And if you want more from Whitney Jones and Pitch, check out the episode we did with them on Ariam's Out of Time and how it may be the most important political album of all time because of its packaging. That's episode number one 24. You can find them both on Apple podcasts or by searching our beautiful and functional website. It's 99pi.org.