Nashville Sounds Alternate
team identity design
———————For the 2016 season, the Nashville Sounds were looking to add to their new branding. The Sounds had just moved into their brand new stadium and only had their new branding (designed by Brandiose) for 2 seasons. But by the 2016 season, the team felt their uniforms all looked the same and wanted something fresh and unique that would stand out and fit in with their existing brand. The Sounds reached out to me to design a few alternate logos and a new uniform for their “Friday Night” home game promotion.
As part of their brief, the Sounds wanted the designs to be heavily influenced on the state of Tennessee and its state flag. They said people have a lot of pride for their flag and wanted to add that to their look. They also wanted the new logos to be music related but not specific to country music. The Nashville Sounds have always wanted to represent “Music City” as a whole and not pander to one type of genre.
The central focus of the Friday alternate jersey is the guitar heads on the sleeves. The Sounds wanted something unique that stood out in Triple-A baseball and paired nicely with their other uniform sets.
Inspiration for this design was drawn from the unique sleeve pattern of the 1970’s- early 1980’s Atlanta Braves unifroms, which doned a feather with a basic stripe at the base of the sleeve.
The sleeve design is based on the head and neck of a six string guitar. The guitar is very important to the growth of the music industry in Nashville and was the perfect fit to make a unique sleeve design. Within the head, you will also find motifs of the Nashville Sounds brand. The Tri-Star of the state flag, the “F” holes that are used throughout the Sounds logos and wordmarks, and the out line of Tennessee helps round out this unique design.
Both uniform ideas used classic Oakland Athletics uniforms as a template and used the primary guitar pick logo of the Nashville Sounds with the new proposed elephant logo on the sleeve. To tie the whole thing together, players would be encouraged to wear white cleats as the white cleat is a call card for the Oakland A’s.
