Are you ready for some Fightins!!?? I am. Are you ready for some trolls in the comments? I think I am. Yes, it’s time to do a behind-the-scenes for what seems like our most controversial project, the renaming and rebranding of the Reading Fightins. Why the Reading Fightins? Besides being a great Minor League Baseball name, it has a great heritage to it. The Philadelphia Phillies, parent club to the Reading Fightins, nickname is the Fightin’ Phils. The town of Reading is a scrappy Pennsylvania town who has taken some lumps in recently, but is fightin’ it’s way back to its dissevered glory (Reading is one of our favorite towns in the U.S.). There’s a sports tradition of using fightin’ as a prefix. The team was one of the last of the holdouts that uses it’s parent club’s team name. Very rare nowadays and for good reason, it can be very confusing.
Let me back up a little. The team came to us over a year ago about going deeper into the R-Phils brand, and ways to celebrate everything in the R-Phils universe. They were also looking for ways honor more of the Phillies heritage, while appealing to the entire Reading community, including Mets fans.
While changing the name was never the goal, it did enter the conversation. There was a consensus that a name change would only be considered, if the right name surfaced. Plus, the name would have to meet the aforementioned goals. We don’t take any rename lightly, but renaming the Reading Phillies, a classic name in Minor League Baseball history, is a big responsibility. But once the Philadelphia Phillies legendary Whiz Kids name “The Fightins” was proposed, it clicked with everyone on heritage and creative levels.
So we hit the sketch pad with our usual mission of defining what should the Fightin’s look like? We started with very rough sketches. One of our first ideas was to use the Phillie Phanatic as a jump off point. What if we could do a Huey, Dewey, and Louie thing with the Phanatic being the Donald Duck in the family. We liked the idea of tying the club back to Philly with boxing/Rocky references.
We also knew that the Crazy Hotdog vendor, the Ostrich riding hotdog throwing mascot has emerged in the last few years as a fan favorite, especially for kids. So we focused an early round on concepts that depicted the ostrich and the crazy hotdog vendor.
Here are some different “F” options, very crude but you can see the influence of the big Phils logos on the design. With a lot more “Reading circus” thrown into the mix.
Here are some script options. Again, a lot of big Phils inspiration.
Tomorrow, more sketches! Thursday night one of the hat designs will be available in the Clink Room store!
The F with the claw…beautiful hat logo. One and done in my book.
Love seeing the process you guys do! Sketches are great, and the stories you give are perfect!
Keep up the great work.
This is why I look at the Clink Room everyday, for stuff like this! Thanks guys for posting these!
love the ostrich ideas, love the cap logos, and love seeing the whole bts process! i want my students to study your site every day…
keep it coming!
I like the ostrich claw gripping the hotdog. That’d be a nice logo for secondary use somewhere.
Concession stands would be the obvious one.
I love the top right ostrich one. Awesome sense of motion conveyed with it. LOVE seeing the sketches and hearing the story and rationale.
http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Troll-300×291.png
There’s your troll in the comments. But seriously, I love this brand. The Fightins, especially the F-fist, kick some butt.
While I’m not a fan of the Reading Fightins rebrand, I will say that I find the pair of logos atop the second batch of sketches – those featuring the Crazy Hot Dog Vendor riding the ostrich – to be terrific.
I love everything about every one of these.
omg the whole batch of ostrich/hotdog sketches is pure fire
So happy you didn’t end up spelling fightin’s with a ph
As much as I love a chance to buy a Brandiose/Clink hat I’ve come to enjoy seeing the idea unfold and evolve.
I like the Vendor/ostrich combo forming the ‘F’ for Fightins.
Once again, loving all these BTS, some crazy stuff right here.
Loving the Huey, Dewey, and Louie idea and digging the Phanatic sketches, would have loved to see a trio of little Phanatics.
Having the chance to take a look behind the scenes is very inspiring – thx!
The baseball seam boxing gloves are great. Some of these sketches are conjuring up the style of old boxing match posters – a rich source of inspiration, I’m finding. Thanks!
Well, I appreciate being called out for being a troll in the very first sentence. I prefer “fan” myself.
I think you will find that the consensus in town here is that Brandiose executed their part of the redesign well. The logos look good, the design is well done. The reason its gone over so poorly in Reading is that the front office executed the rebranding process so poorly.
No fan warning, no fan input, no recognition that people are REALLY not interested in the ostrich logo. Not to mention that, but there seemed to be no discerning eye about how much was “too much”. The away jersey (which there is no mention of here, yet), don’t point to this branding effort AT ALL.
It’s just a big mish mash of every idea they had. I put the blame for that on the front office.
Wow. These are beautiful and I am really enjoying your process for these. It’s interesting to see how it started off and where it is going. As both a creative and a Phillies fan this is some thing I have really been waiting to see. The Phanatic with boxing gloves is pretty BA too. Love it.
I was also wondering, at what levels have Major League clubs been interested in your solutions besides the Reds (which is fantastic BTW). I can’t help but look at the P iterations and the one on the top right looking like a great blend of the Phillies’ Whiz Kids script with the modern P. I’d love to see a Phillies update only because a lot of it looks really forced because of the type they’ve used for the front of the shirts and logos. From a design perspective I am not a fan, even if I love the team I think there has to be a way to do something kind of like was done for the Reds.