This question probably has an obvious answer, but were you passionate about sports as a kid?

I was not necessarily a great athlete when I was growing up, but I was a sports fan, and baseball has always been dearest to my heart. It’s a marathon of a season. In New York you’ve got the Mets and the Yankees, so there are a lot of games, and it was always there in the summer when you’d be off from school and up late watching TV. In the ’70s, there were a lot of sports on TV—though there was less TV than there is now [laughs]—and there were different leagues and new teams, and it was this moment that was, in retrospect, very expressive from a visual perspective.

And I noticed all of that and, because of my family background, I would say that I observed the games through a little bit of a different lens. I would go to, let’s say, a Yankee game with my dad, and I would doodle out all the logos of the American League teams in the scorebook. Now all these years later, my work has been on all of those uniforms, and I’ve even replaced a couple of them entirely.

Were there any particular team uniforms or logos from that time that stick out as favorites? When I think of 1970s baseball fashion, I think of the Pittsburgh Pirates hat that looked like a layer cake.

Yeah! It’s funny you mention that—I just got back from PNC Park in Pittsburgh, where they commissioned me to make a piece of art for the ballpark that honors Willie Stargell¹, and I created a series of Andy Warhol–style portraits as a tribute to that era.

I noticed those Pirates uniforms when they came out. They inspired me because they showed that things don’t have to be just black or white or gray. There was a wonderful expression that extended down through the brand. The Houston Astros’ famous rainbow uniforms were another example. All these years later, they are often imitated but never duplicated.

I’m kind of all over the map as far as favorite team identities. On the one hand, I appreciate the classics, like the Montreal Canadiens in hockey or the Green Bay Packers in football. They look great and are associated with winning and have a unique sort of mystique. The original logo of the Toronto Blue Jays, from 1977, could almost be a corporate logo in certain respects, but it’s elegant, it’s modern and it extended out to all these different uniforms and wordmarks and pieces of design that were flawlessly activated. Peter Good’s Hartford Whalers logo, to designers and many sports fans who are not necessarily into design, is considered to be the GOAT: you’ve got a W; you’ve got a whale’s fluke above it; and you’ve got a negative space in between that contains an H, for Hartford. So it does a lot with a little. There’s an elegance to it that is timeless and wonderful.

But having grown up in the ’70s, I do appreciate some of the more, frankly, garish and [laughs] silly identities of that era.

Features

The SVA alumnus and Alumni Society board chair on his three-plus decades in the field.