Charles Apple

Last week, I marketed my latest free-lance project: A quick-reference guide to the holiday football bowl games.

I actually hadn’t planned to blog about this one. But my dad asked me to.

This project was a simple grid of the 34 bowl games scheduled between last Saturday and Jan. 8, when the BCS Championship Game will be held in Miami. All the games are shown in chronological order. I included team logos, records, ranking and a very brief sentence about each game — just something notable about the game or what to watch for in the game.

I was grateful to find three buyers for this piece. On the left is the page as shipped to the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star. On the right is the page as delivered to the Baltimore Sun:

Both are four columns, which left room for a related story down the side.

Here is the third version, which ran in the Harrisburg, Pa., Patriot News. The Patriot News‘ sports section is a tabloid, so I offered to slice the page into two parts so they could run on facing pages:

All three papers ran the grid in color, I’m told. And all three ran it last Saturday, which was the first day of bowl season. There were four bowl games that day.

I pitched the page to 46 newspapers. I intentionally left a couple inches of space along the bottom of the grid in hopes of some papers selling an ad adjacency there. I don’t think anyone actually did that, though.

I also offered a five-column version with dummy copy blocks in case someone wanted to run the page the way I always had in the past: We’d get the college football writer to put together two or three sentences for each game, plus a guess at the final score. Over the years, we’ve discovered that readers like to keep up with the results and then write or e-mail your writer, pointing out what a dumbass he is.

Also — and perhaps more importantly — I suggested that papers might run this on Christmas Day or the day after as interesting holiday filler. It’s a simple matter to either slice off the games already played, making the grid shorter, or to replace the copy blocks with the results of those games.

(Self-serving note: And it’s still a great idea. If you’d like to buy the graphic, contact me immediately. Operators are standing by… )

It’s been 12 years since I built my first bowl guide grid. I originally pitched the idea in 1997, during my second football season at the Chicago Tribune. I noticed we were running a large page of dry text-driven bowl capsules, so I suggested I build it as a visual-driven grid.

To my delight, someone — as I recall, it was Joe Knowles, who’s now AME of design and graphics for the Trib — said yes. The fabulous Andrew Bagnato wrote the copy and I designed:

There were only 21 bowl games back then. Ah, how quaint.

After two years of building this page for the fine readers in Chicagoland, I became graphics editor of The Des Moines Register. I showed my tearsheets to sports editor Randy Brubaker — now the Register’s managing editor — who was too happy to give me a color page in his section. Football writer John Shipley, I believe, wrote the text for us.

We made two big changes to the page: First, I delegated the actual assembly of the page to my staffers. And secondly, we dropped the 3-D-like, “button” logos in favor of square logos that were much easier to assemble. On the left is the second bowl page we ran in Des Moines in 2000, on the right is the fourth from 2002:

Note we tried to highlight our local bowl-bound teams: In this case, Iowa and Iowa State.

Later, of course, I became graphics director of The Virginian-Pilot. Naturally, I ported the idea over with me. I also resumed building the page myself. Rich Radford picked up the writing chores.

On the left is the first Pilot version from 2003, on the right is the page from 2005:

In 2006, our sports guys wanted to split the page over the top two-thirds of two facing pages. They also wanted to find a way to emphasize the big-ticket games. I wasn’t nearly as happy with what we came up with:

The problem is that the grid breaks down on the right-hand page, which makes the page much more difficult to follow. If it were only the last six games or so that we were emphasizing, it would have been no problem. But the NCAA folks interspace the big BCS games among smaller, lesser bowls in the days after New Year’s.

Unfortunately, we also lost our color position. Seeing all the brightly-colored team logos together on the same page — well, it’s fun.

Last year — 2007 — I was tied up in the latter stages of handing my department over to other folks, so they asked me if I minded if we had a designer put together the page instead. I was delighted with what Josh Bohling did with it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a jpeg to show you.

I was so happy that three papers picked up the graphic, keeping the idea alive for year 12. It might be more than a decade old, but it’s still a great way to display this info. Readers love grids.

Linda Grist Cunningham of the Rockford paper, for example, tells me her husband read the whole thing, unprompted, at the breakfast table. But I have an even better example.

When I finished this piece last week, my wife was in Atlanta, staying with her dad and mom. Her dad had some minor surgery recently, so she was helping out around the house.

I recalled that Sharon’s dad likes this graphic very much — in fact, he was visiting us in Chicago the first year we ran it. So I converted one to PDF and e-mailed it to Sharon so she could print it out for him.

The next morning, Sharon and her dad were going for a morning walk when her dad began chatting with a neighbor about the bowl games. He happened to mention he had a handy guide to the bowls, back at the house, built by his son-in-law, the newspaper designer. The neighbor asked when it would be running in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Heh.

So they printed out a copy and gave it to him. Sharon said this gave her an idea: Perhaps she should print out a big batch of the grids and sell them at Discover Mills Mall.

This year’s grid was a bit more of a challenge than usual: Normally, I work with a full-time college football reporter. Being fresh out of those here in the Apple household, I read a lot of web sites before writing one paltry sentence on each game.

I tried to make them as interesting and lively as I could. Dull writing can just kill a presentation like this.

The other thing that slowed me down a great deal was a decision I made to return to the labor-intensive logos I had used at the Tribune, 12 years ago. As I recall, Steve Layton had originally created the “button” logos for NFL teams. I remember splitting up the list of teams and helping him build them. I picked up the same style on the college logos and had a few dozen built by the time I abandoned the style, nine years ago.

I tried building some bubble-style logos using some of the transparency tools not available to us back then, but I wasn’t impressed with the results. And I didn’t want to go back to the flat look. Besides, with 34 bowl games, I really needed horizontal logos. My trusty square logos just wouldn’t do.

So I gritted my teeth and I drew a bunch of new button logos. And man, did that take a long time.

I think all the work paid off, though. One paper asked for the logos to use on a page they were building themselves.

Naturally, I had a few that haven’t changed in 12 years. For example:

But the huge majority of them — perhaps more than two-thirds — had to be redrawn. Some required minor tweaks, but others had to be built from scratch:

I tried hard to mimic, as closely as possible, each team’s helmet logo. So, for example, I cast aside the “SC” logo I had for Southern Cal and went with the Trojan head. Arizona used to have while helmets, but they’ve changed. So I redrew to match the background of the bubble to their new blue helmet color. I had an old Northern Illinois logo, but I updated to their current logo. Pittsburgh and Boise State made major changes that required completely new drawings.

And Vanderbilt? Heh. No, I didn’t have them among my collection of bowl logos.

And then I had a number of logos that caused me a royal pain:

These were logos that had so many little parts that the highlight — which consists of a series of masks — ended up with layer upon layer upon layer of hidden pieces. The Oklahoma State logo was difficult because of the subtle difference in the two shades of orange. The Troy logo had way too many pieces, including two red tones and two siver tones.

But the South Carolina Gamecock logo was the one that caused me the greatest amount of grief. It took me hours to paste all the shaded black pieces into the correct spots and then to keep from accidently selecting them again.

Memo to the University of South Carolina: As a loyal Clemson fan, I never cared much for the Gamecocks anyway. At least now, I have a good reason!

How about simplifying your logo? While you’re at it, change your mascot to something that doesn’t honor an illegal sport.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, Innovative ideas, Sports design, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.