Here’s a logo I did for a new basketball team in Pittsburgh, PA. They wanted something with an old train and a basketball in it that could be embroidered onto shorts and jerseys and provided me with the color palette.

The logo has subsequently 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 words, so I created the variation below, which has been well-received.

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, so opted for a version with a plain gray background. I still prefer this one.