The Scoring Factory

The Scoring Factory is a rather aptly named basketball skills clinic based in Pittsburgh, which is known for having a lot of defunct old factories from the Steel Mill days accenting the landscape. I wanted to capture both the image of a factory and of a basketball, and ended up creating a sunrise positioning between two buildings.

The logo has been put on posters, t-shirts, basketballs, etc. and has been printed in 2-color and one-color. The folks at the Scoring Factory decided they wanted a more streamlined version with more emphasis on the word “Scoring,” so I created the variation below, which has been well-received.

Here is a version on black. Notice I added a subtle radial background in dark gray so that the black shadow sides of the buildings didn’t get lost.

Here is the revised logo applied on a black T-shirt.

When it came time to create a promotional poster, I was given this image of a basketball player taken with a point-and-shoot camera. The background was shadowed and busy, so that made cutting out the image rather tedius.

Luckily, there are two tools available to designers that allow them to get around such obstacles: creativity+Photoshop. When I have a low resolution or grainy image to start with, there are a few ways to go.

I chose to reduce the image to black and white, and then colorize it. From there, I wanted to give it a feeling of crazy motion. I added some diagonals for dimension, and brightened the color for impact.

As it happens, they wanted something more conservative, and opted for a version with a plain gray background. I still prefer where this one was going….