On social media, you don’t have to look long for an edited photo of James Harden in a Miami Heat uniform. Or, scroll a bit further and see a graphic announcing a scholarship offer for a recruit to Alabama or USC. Or follow every Sunday as teams get closer to a top NFL draft pick and their fans imagine Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence in one NFL jersey or another.
It’s always Photoshop SZN somewhere. This year, some of it happens to overlap.
National signing day in college football is Wednesday. NBA trades and transactions are still going as the league begins play next week. The NFL draft is just months away. The jersey swaps, the wild graphics, the memes — they’re all there.
Sometimes these works are wishful thinking. The fan-fiction of an NBA fan imagining a world in which a desired free agent is now wearing the uniform of that fan’s favorite team. Sometimes they are part of an organizational strategy. A modern, visual medium meant to enhance and display a college football powerhouse.
These are, as Samuel Silverman, a former creative director at Ohio State, calls them, “pieces of different aspects of a visual language all come together with a look and feel of one holistic piece.”
These pieces have become an extension of sports fandom, as much a part of modern sports culture as fantasy teams and alternate uniforms. But, make no mistake, they are works of art that can take hours of thought, planning and execution.
“Everything I make, there’s a connection being made to something else, and I think that art is like that in a sense, too,” said Jake Pablo, a graphic design student at Florida Atlantic University. “Usually artists will make something and it’s trying to paint a certain picture, deliver a message in a certain way, and my jersey swaps, my designs, anything I do, I’m trying to convey a message.”
“Today we’re going to set text on fire”
Silverman was a week away from graduating from Ohio State in 2012 and working at a pizza restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, when the school’s department of design got an email from the athletic department looking for graphic design interns. Urban Meyer had been hired as the Buckeyes’ head coach, and the team wanted to revamp its recruiting efforts.
He started by making schedule graphics, then helped establish recruiting graphics for social media as a branding opportunity for football recruits and a staple of recruiting efforts for major college football programs all over the country.
Pablo is a 22-year-old student. He grew up drawing, painting and loving basketball. He is also a massive Heat fan. Pablo made his first design in 2014, during LeBron James‘ final season in Miami.
Since then, he has interned as a graphic designer for the Florida Panthers while also making hype graphics and jersey swaps that have had players such as Victor Oladipo, Bradley Beal and Giannis Antetokounmpo in Heat jerseys.
Ryan Meils studies graphic design at Waukesha (Wisconsin) County Technical College. In a way, at 20 years old, he is part of the second generation of online creators. He took up Photoshop in high school and was drawn to sports by jersey swaps created by media companies and other creators on social media.
“I started off with little sports designs,” Meils said. “I always saw the sports media pages on Twitter or Instagram and saw their jersey swaps. I just found it so cool, and that got me into it.”
Now he has created MLB and NBA crossover jerseys and the logo, uniforms and arena for a fictitious WNBA team in Milwaukee.
They began as artistic children and by teaching themselves to make designs on different platforms and with different software.
Pablo and his friends created YouTube channels in high school, and he wanted to add graphics to video. Like others trying to learn a language, a recipe or a hobby, he sought out online tutorials.
“I wanted to learn how to make [banner artwork],” Pablo said. “So, I would download templates online and basically say they were mine. … They were never really mine, and I wanted to learn how to do that.”
Silverman studied design in college and was well into a job doing graphic art at Ohio State, but growing as an artist still meant learning on the fly.
“While I was at OSU, every day I was going to tutorial after tutorial after tutorial to learn different ways,” Silverman said. “I didn’t have any rhyme or reason to what I was making every day, it was just whatever tutorial I was doing, like, ‘Today we’re going to set text on fire.’
“It was like, ‘Cool, today I’m going to learn that and apply it to the graphic I’m making.'”
As Ohio State took Silverman’s work and launched a whole new way of recruiting that meant prospect-centered media of all kinds — video, printed mail and digital graphics — while also making it about branding for individual recruits.
The branding, according to Silverman, who has done design work for Arizona State and Syracuse, became part of the graphics and showed high school players what that kind of personalized touch could mean for their careers at Ohio State and beyond. Now with “name, image, likeness” legislation being enacted in some states, Silverman said the recruiting graphics help recruits learn what those things are worth.
“We were educating recruits to their personal brand,” Silverman said. “Why that can be a benefit to them. … It’s not just a logo and content and all that but who you are as a person and what you want to do in life.”
Did it work? In Silverman’s time at Ohio State, with Meyer and his successor Ryan Day, the Buckeyes had one recruiting class ranked lower than seventh in ESPN’s recruiting class rankings.
“I’ll retaliate with your favorite player”
Pablo and Meils don’t have a professional reason to do what they do. They aren’t making their living doing these graphics. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a purpose for them and their social media following.
“I started the jersey swaps in particular because of all the jersey swaps of Giannis [Antetokounmpo] that other teams have,” Meils said. “I started doing it with other teams’ players because it fits into the story of we want Giannis to stay [in Milwaukee] and I’ll retaliate with your favorite player.”
That’s where, especially in basketball, the art has become an extension of online sports fandom. Fans of teams have factions of online creators pumping out memes, swaps and graphics to show their allegiances. Especially, it seems, fans of the Heat.
“The Heat fans, it’s like a stereotype, they have every NBA star in a jersey swap,” Meils said.
Prior to Harden showing up in graphics in a Miami jersey, Beal, the Washington Wizards‘ star guard, was the prime target for Heat fans online. In 2019, Beal acknowledged noticing those Miami fans.
“It’s a great thing that a lot of people love your game and want you on their team,” Beal said on NBCSports.com.
That’s where it gets fun for these artists. Every team has its social media feed where fans get videos, graphics, interviews and coverage. Fans are getting instant access to their teams. Silverman noted this access is “a level of connection and vulnerability that hasn’t been seen before.”
“I call it ‘Heat Propaganda,'” Pablo said. “You’re pushing a narrative to create this storyline for a player to come to the Heat. That has to matter. It has to.”
And the creators such as Pablo, Silverman and Meils get to influence the online community. Whether it’s showing a recruit a version of what his future could be if he chooses a particular school or creating a fictional super team on a graphic, the creators are making art to be a part of their teams. When big news happens, including when, on Tuesday, Antetokounmpo signed a $228 million extension to stay in Milwaukee, they get to gloat about it.
“The countermeasures to all the Giannis jersey swaps worked,” Meils said Tuesday. “And it feels great to know that Bucks fans won the Photoshop war.”
