Before I give any details, let me draw a comparison everyone can relate to: Imagine being told you're getting a pony every year for Christmas. Then, to your infinite dismay, you receive a rocking horse for three straight years. Finally, just when you are about to give up hope of riding a your very own Seabiscuit, the fourth Christmas comes and there's Pegasus standing in your living room. Better yet, it's that dog/dragon thing from Neverending Story.
From the ashes rose NCAA Football 2010's TeamBuilder feature. As a design/videogame nerd, this is as close to nirvana as one can get. The TeamBuilder feature lets you design your school online, and download it to your system for free. Every inch of the field is yours to play with, every fiber of the uniform is yours to design. Imagine my glee when over 60 jersey options were placed before me. Pant/helmet/jersey combinations were seemingly endless. I could customize each stripe and pattern- even make my own colors! I quickly grabbed a towel to protect my computer from drool and set out to create the most thoroughly designed team I could dream up. Then I found the golden icing on the cake: a flawless logo importing feature. That's right, I can design a custom logo in Photoshop, upload it into the Teambuilder, and it's right there on my helmets, jersey, and field. (As a tip to save some time, I recommend creating a logo with a transparent background to import, so as to not interfere with your unis or field. Just be sure to save your logo as a transparent gif or png so you don't get that annoying white square behind your design). As a designer let me tell you, there is nothing more nerdily satisfying than seeing a logo you created displayed 20 yards wide in the video game you play.
The first team took me 2.5 hours to create and I have to say, I'm frighteningly happy with the outcome. Here are the logos:
Behold the Dryden University Destroyers! (alliteration is key). My second effort took far less time as I refined the process and roped in my cohort and business partner:
And, in case you're wondering, that is the Ladson Aviation Academy Blue Barons. If you're looking for a fun distraction or just a different design outlet, try it out. You'd be amazed how much time you can spend creating an identity for a fictional school. We are still fooling around with it and adding new schools all the time. You can search "thestylishphase" as a gamer tag to see our list so far. If you have any ideas or requests, let us know. But if you have some time to kill, I highly recommend checking out the created teams out there on the EA servers. All you have to do is go to the Teambuilder site and check out new schools. http://www.easportsworld.com/en_US/ncaafootball/create_a_school#/home
The Wendys Pigtailers are a pretty awesome addition the the NCAA if I do say so myself.
-J.J.
Editor's note: I gotta admit my anticipation of this game was running high at first, but the call of the gridiron turned out to be less appealing to me than making the logos. Or killing zombies. -b
