PAUL GEORGE DESIGN SESSION

The approach to the Paul George design session was to create a line of caps inspired by many of the highlights of his basketball career. We wanted to touch on everything from his high school career to representing USA in the 2016 Olympics.

A few samples from that line are shown below. The Pacers 50th Anniversary features an athletic gold to tie back to the 50 Anniversary and features a matching pony hair visor. The front logo is the Pacers Hardwood Classic logo and the side is a woven patch with the official Pacers 50th Anniversary logo.

I always appreciated the Fresno State cap in this line. As simple as it may look, there’s one distinct feature about it that really makes this a Paul George original and that’s the 24 in the dog tag. Normally it has a V representing the San Joaquin Valley, but we were able to convince the school to allow the change to 24 representing Paul’s college number.

The USA hat was special since it represented more than one team. The Pacers logo colored with the stars and stripes is a magnificent way to to support both your local and national teams.

For a look at the complete line of hats designed and Paul’s insights on the, please follow the link below.

https://www.nba.com/pacers/video/paul-george-new-era-team-up-create-hats

DONOVAN MITCHELL DESIGN SESSION

I met with New Era brand ambassador Donovan Mitchell in Salt Lake City to collaborate on his signature line of caps. I spoke with Donovan about what kind of fashion interests him and how he wanted the hats to look. Through our conversation, we came up with a few directions to follow. He wanted to use red prominently in a design as well as camouflage. We created a story based around a custom red camouflage and incorporated other colors from the Utah Jazz’s city edition jersey to merchandise nicely with Jazz jerseys and apparel.

To further authenticate some of the caps in the collection, we took some of the other ideas discussed like using contrast stitching and mountains to tie back to some of the other Jazz activations that year.

The Jazz were wearing their 1996 Hardwood Classic jerseys for a few games that year and was a perfect way to incorporate the mountain idea. The Jazz ‘96 logo was embroidered on the front and a custom photo real mountain “camo” pattern was sublimated on the visor and button.

The contrast stitching idea was expressed with using the Jazz’s traditional jersey colors. Instead of picking one solid color for the contrast stitching , we created a gradient thread pulling colors from their statement jerseys. The gradient thread was even used to as a running stitch in the front logo.

As a final touch I created a removable metal pin with Donovan’s personal Spida Mitchell logo. This worked as a nice signature as that logo appears on other apparel / accessories Donovan is sponsored by.