Giving cricket it’s swag: merchandise art direction for Cricket Australia, The Ashes Series and the Big Bash
Who
Cricket Australia via Apparent
What
Graphic Design
Art Direction
Why
After launching their new brand platform, Cricket Australia needed to provide tools for Licensees to use for merchandise creation. Studio Launch (working with Apparent) was tasked with creating new pattern designs, multiple suites of mockups and guidelines for the Cricket Australia masterbrand, Big Bash League and The Ashes Series ‘21-22.
Cricket Australia were keen to move away from the traditional viewpoint of cricket as ‘male, pale and stale’. This approach feeds into everything they do from high level campaigns right down to merchandise creation.
Along with the existing typography treatment and existing elements, we created a series of stylised 2D graphic elements and demonstrated how they could be deployed across a variety of different types of merchandise, from tote bags to towels, kids lunchboxes to backpacks.
We created licensee styleguides, helping partners to understand the Cricket masterbrand and how to consistently apply it to various different types of merchandise.
For the first time, we unified the approach of the Men’s and Women’s Ashes, showing how the masterbrand assets could be treated and applied to merchandise across both these prestigious sporting events.
For the Big Bash, we demonstrated a generic application of brand assets on kids cricket bats, balls and stumps. But to really tap into the appeal of supporting your chosen team we focused our efforts on demonstrating how brand assets could be applied to each individual team. We created two patterns that tie back into the masterbrand – a typographic treatment and a repeated speed lines pattern.
