99% Invisible - 357- The Barney Design redux

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our hometown team here at 99pi, we've been following these NBA finals for another design-related reason. When you watch the games in Toronto the whole stadium is filled with people wearing red raptors jerseys, but every now and then you'll see these little flashes of purple. Those bold fans are wearing one of the most polarizing jerseys in the history of sports. A jersey that we actually did a whole episode about last year. So in honor of the Toronto Raptors, and the beautifully ugly jersey they gave the world, we're gonna rerun that episode for you today, along with an update from our new 99pi team member Chris Berube, a Torontonian and Raptors fan since he was a kid. The Barney Design Redux

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. All over Oakland right now, people are wearing warrior shirts and find their warriors flags from their cars. And as much as we like our hometown team here at Nine and Empire, we've been following these NBA finals for another design-related reason. When you watch the games in Toronto, the whole stadium is filled with people wearing red raptors, jerseys, and these t-shirts that say we the north on them.

But every now and then, you see little flashes of purple. Those bold fans are wearing one of the most polarizing jerseys in sports history. A jersey, we actually did a whole episode about last year. So in honor of the Toronto Raptors and the beautifully ugly jersey they gave the world, we're gonna rerun that episode for you today, plus an update from our newest 99Pi team member,

Chris Baroube, who was raised and currently resides in the Great North. He is very excited right now. Stay with us. Go all of us. Buzzer. On a March afternoon in 1996, the 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, 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 is 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. a barney design because their road uniform was 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, like 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, and 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.

One of 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, it just looks 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 join 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 study graphic design here at Columbia College back in Chicago. 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 looks something like that classic bulls 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 was 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 player's backs. But that was all about to change, because in 1988, 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-terraway warm-ups to reveal the Hornets' new uniforms. T.O. 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 but it's not NBA blue, it's not Celtic screen, it's not Lakers yellow. Tom O'Grady had nothing to do with the Teal 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, it would have taken a massive amount of embroidery. And all that thread would have added additional weight and made the Jersey hotter to wear. But soon after Tom O'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 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 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. He was a fellow Chicagoan so as soon as you heard my accent, he's like, I think we're going to get along. I think us Chicago guys kind of get this. Here's what I want to do. I want to have a logo that's going to 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 Sun's redesign. They come up with this big basketball that's also a sun. something futuristic, but classic. So Tom and his team started on the Sun's 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 and 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 finalsals 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 to Troy 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 a time. The technology led us to the 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 on 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 puzzled like, what did he mean by that? He said, I'm not going to wear this uniform forever. I don't, you know, 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 cloth, pinstripes that looked like a raptor common 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-rarapped to represent Canada, which made all the sense in the world.

I don't know how much sense that made, but that jersey, it's all. I think it was the top-selling expansion team logo we ever did even today. The sales were through the roof. Before they ever played a game, before the team had even signed a single player, the Raptors were 7th in the league in merchandise sales.

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 Supersonics, 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, Schultt hated the Sonic's 90s look that had been designed by none other than our pal Tom. We were able to take this kind of basketball spinning around space needle and kind of have this super man font and added toward silics 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 kindergarten 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 its strength? By the start of the 2001-2002 season, everything was in place. Green and gold, no 3-D anything, no giant logo's 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 the 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 simple font. No crazy claw marks, no dinosaurs. And it's like I've seen better inner-me-year old jerseys at college. Here is Tom O'Grady again. They're just, there's 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, 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 actors, 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 it a 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, you know, 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 clawcut pinstripes and a red dinosaur, real blame, a basketball. The Toronto Raptors have won their way into the NBA finals and that Barney jersey is more desirable than ever. We'll have a report from the 99PI editor and Canadian Chris Baroubae after this. So I'm in the studio with Chris Baroubae. He's our resident Canadian special projects editor and a long suffering Raptors fan who is very excited that the Raptors are in the finals.

I genuinely can't believe this is happening Roman. I have been a Raptors fan since I was eight years old and I am in my early 30s. So it has been a great deal of sports related suffering in my life. So I want to count for all that suffering. I mean, why has it been so hard to be a fan of the Raptors? In the early days, it was really tricky because the team came to Toronto. Nobody in Toronto cared about basketball over hockey. In the really early days, they actually played in a baseball stadium because the basketball

stadium wasn't ready yet. So they set them up in this baseball stadium. And if you had like 15,000 fans, like that's a good number of basketball fans, but a baseball stadium seats like 45,000 people. So they just had these rows of empty seats with tarps over them. When you'd go to the game, it was really disperiding.

And players just really didn't want to play in Canada partly because of stereotypes about it's too cold, and the taxes are high. I mean, the taxes are also high in places like California comparatively, but people didn't want to move up here. But very famously, one player just refused to come. Alonso Morning was like traded to the Raptors and he said, yeah, I'm just not going to do that.

And they had to like, create them somewhere else. And players kept having these like weird excuses for not being here. Like, there was this guy, Antonio Davis, who played for the team, who said he was actually like worried about his kids learning the metric system. Like, that was an anxiety for him. So there was this like fatalism to Raptor's fandom mirror. It's like nobody wants to play here. It's a place that, you know, a player,

it's not seen as like a desirable location for players to end up. And then, you know, we had to wear this uniform in the really early days with the Raptor on it and the bright purple. And lots of players didn't like that. Like lots of players were saying, like, yeah, this is the only profession where like you hit the very top of your field and then you have to wear a purple dinosaur uniform. Unless your field is being Bernie the dinosaur, that's the only other one.

But it sounds like people kind of like that Jersey now, right? It's true. I think people have really come around on it, especially with the playoffs happening now. So, I've had all these friends who have been going up to buy Raptors gear and there've been lined up south the door and all the dinosaur stuff for the most part is just completely sold out.

And I went to this vintage store actually, fairly close to where I am called Inventage We Trust. It's run by this guy named Josh Brooder. And he's been selling Raptors merchandise forever and he is Toronto born and raised. Me and Sean taller, Toronto Nians. We would say Toronto Nians, but you would say Toronto Nians, yeah.

And my missing something, what is the difference between those two things you just said? Yeah, well, Toronto Nians, if you hit that last T, that shows that you're not from here. It's people who are from here say Toronto. Oh, I see. You can drop the last T. I see. So it's the Toronto Raptors, not the Toronto Raptors.

Yeah. If you want to sound credible in the next few days, you say the Toronto Raptors. So Josh and his partner, Shantel, they run this vintage store and he says the last few weeks, he's been getting requests like every half hour for some version of the purple dinosaur uniform from the early days. And Josh, he's like everybody, he knows the dinosaur is a pretty ridiculous look. It almost makes no sense. Like the actual logo is a dinosaur, But the actual logo is a dinosaur, whole dribbling abasque of all one way. He's turning around the other way, and his toes are coming out of a pair of sneakers.

It's completely absurd and ridiculous, and not only is it like a logo on a hat as a fan, the players are literally wearing this logo on their jerseys. It's insane. So everyone wants the Barney jersey, but also everyone kind of acknowledges that it's a little bit silly. So why do people like it now? Talking to Josh, I came away with two things.

So the first is that the team is winning and nobody wants to look like a bandwagon fan. So nobody wants to look like they've heard about the rules of basketball in the last two weeks. They just realized this is something they're obsessed with. So everybody wants to make it seem like they've been there since the beginning. So if you wear the purple dyno jersey, you look credible. So especially if it's a really obscure player, like Josh told me he's been getting requests for people like Oliver Miller, who I had to look up.

I had no idea who that was and I cared about the team forever. So people are spending like all this money to get these jerseys of players nobody's ever heard of. The other thing is nostalgia, right? Nostalgia does not have to make sense. It doesn't have to be something that is pretty or nice. And this is what Josh says vintage is all about. It's about what the logo evokes for people. It's what time it sends you back to. And when you look at that

Raptors uniform, when you look at that purple on the Jersey, that is the 90s. They reminds me of like Space Jam of like this era when there was so much silly basketball stuff happening. And it really just sends you back to that time. The logo is cartoonish and it's very reminiscent of a specific era. And people love reliving parts of their lives through tangible items, things that they can touch and feel. That's why people are paying out to own an original piece because they're investing in their past. So obviously the Raptors are not wearing the purple uniform from the 90s in the finals right now. They're wearing their current uniform, which is pretty simple. It's pretty clean.

It's like a white uniform with the black Sans The White San Serif fonts, the word Raptors across the front. And then sometimes they wear a red uniform with the white Sanseriff raptors across the front. And then Roman, this is where it gets very exciting. They have a third uniform, which is black with a white Sanseriff raptors across the front. That's when it gets really exciting. I mean, you're mixing it up.

But I have seen this one that's like, it says North on it. What is, do you describe that one for us? Yeah, they call that the city Jersey. It's a red Jersey. It has like a white chevron. So it's like this white arrow pointing up. And it says North on it. I actually think that one's pretty stylish. Like I like that one the best of their current uniforms. But with all of them, it's like they're good design, they're very clean, they're very simple, and ultimately they're very safe.

The current Raptors uniform, it doesn't have a lot of, umph. It's kind of weird for me to look at a Raptors jersey with no purple in it. I get it like you got to move away from the purple for a few years, but like, why isn't the Dino Jersey being worn as an alternate by the team at this point?

Like, how crazy would a fan get for a quite Leonard Raptors Dino Jersey? Like, could you imagine? Ha ha ha. Give the people what they want. At the time we're recording this, Game 5 has just happened. The series is still alive. The Raptors have one or two chances to make this happen.

So, Kauai Leonard, I know you are an avid listener of, of design podcasts. See if you can make this happen before the finals are over. Oh, it would be so great if this showed up on the court at Oracle. I mean, oh my god, I would love it. All right, thank you, Chris. Thank you, Roman. 99% of Asible was produced this week by Whitney Jones and Emmett Fitzgerald, with an assist from our new editor, Chris Barube.

Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Rial. Kitty Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Colstad, Chris Baroube. Mix and Tech Production by Sherefusif Music by Sean Rial. Kidding Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor, Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffman, Taren Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco, in produced, Unradio Row, In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California.

99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show in joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or a Quran Instagram Tumblr and Reddit too. But you can tell us all about your favorite

NBA Jersey on our website, it's 99PI.org. Radio Tapio from PRX.