As every designer will tell you, the art of graphic design combines the familiar and the unique, the known and the unknown. The trick is striking the balance. “That’s always the challenge — how much you tap into what people already know or are aware of, versus how much you take them someplace entirely new,” acknowledges Greg Breeding, creative director on the Negro Leagues Baseball cancellation project.
This particular cancellation project exemplified that challenge: While the Negro leagues participated in the broader baseball culture — familiar to baseball fans today — they were also part of an era that had its own distinctive, lesser-known style. “Negro leagues baseball was, in fact, a whole other world,” Breeding says.
Mike Ryan served as designer of both cancellations. He found himself balancing visual elements from mainstream baseball with the visual subculture found in advertisements from that time. “I looked at old posters advertising Negro leagues games,” Ryan recalls. “They’re all handmade; the typography isn’t perfectly aligned. They look very utilitarian.”
As a result, Ryan chose a font called Gotham, which is based on urban signage from the same era as the Negro leagues. He used Gotham for the words Negro Leagues on the black-and-white cancellation and for the word Baseball on the Digital Color Postmark.
Ryan’s other choices in typography are more familiar, though just as true to the period. Brothers, the angular font used for the word Baseball on the black-and-white cancellation, evokes the long-standing look of jersey numbers. And the words Negro Leagues on the DCP are in a font appropriately named Ballpark, a variant of the classic swirling script that has been associated with baseball for 150 years. Inspired by World Series logos, Ryan decided to enclose the visuals of each cancellation inside a shape.
Working within the requisite three-inch by one-and-a-half-inch dimensions, Ryan again combined both known and unknown elements. For the DCP, he started with an ornately curved outline, which he filled with familiar colors and the commonplace pattern of pinstripes. “No simple element says baseball more than the pinstripe of a uniform,” Ryan says.
For the black-and-white cancellation, Ryan chose the iconic triangular shape of a pennant but filled it with visual elements that do not feel like modern baseball imagery. Negro leagues advertisements, however, were embellished with a wide variety of graphics, and Ryan carefully chose elements for their retro feel.
As a fan of mainstream baseball, someone who grew up collecting pennants, Ryan still pushed for the unfamiliar style of his designs on the Negro Leagues Baseball cancellations, and they became some of his favorites.
Crafting a strong design in a small space is always a challenge; combining the warmth of recognition and the beauty of the unexpected in that small space is something else again.
Poster image courtesy of the Negro League Baseball Players Association
Pennant image courtesy of the Negro League Baseball Museum