Montego Bay Lions

Created: 2014
Revised: 2022
Course: Portfolio Review
Tools: Pencil & Paper, Illustrator, Photoshop

The National Basketball Association, or NBA, is a professional basketball league in North America consisting of 30 teams (29 American, 1 Canadian). It is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world. For several years now, going back to over a decade, the league commissioner, Adam Silver, has spoken of the possibility of expanding the league to add more teams. Seattle, Las Vegas, and even overseas in England, have been floating around as possible destinations for the hypothetical 31st (and maybe 32nd) team in the Association. For this project, I went a different route and introduced the world to the newest NBA franchise, operating out of the beautiful island of Jamaica.

This is a fictional NBA brand that I made for my Portfolio Review course and have updated about a decade later. At first I wasn’t really a fan due to the difficulty of finding good mockups to really sell my vision but as soon as I found amazingly realistic templates, I went to work updating everything.

One of the easiest parts of creating the brand was coming up with the brand itself. Already knowing where I wanted to place this expansion team, it was easy to choose the colors (the colors of the Jamaican national flag) and the mascot (Lions are often associated with Rastafarianism, a religion synonymous with Jamaica).

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One of the hardest parts of creating the actual logo. The first attempt to draw the lion head was attrocious and probably shouldn’t be seen by mortal eyes. And the wordmark itself wasn’t anything good either. It took a while (years) before I came up with a typeface and icon that I really like.

The thing that really sells a brand is seeing it used in real world applications and since it would be a little impractical (and borderline impossible) to get an actual basketball court made, a high quality template like this one is amazing to have.

In fact, it was because I found these really great template mock-ups that you’re seeing now that this particular brand was rescued from the scrap heap. Seeing these beautifully rendered 3D mock-ups inspired me to take another shot at what I once considered my weakest project.

My favorite team in all of sports is the Orlando Magic. Basic, I know. One thing I love about this team is our identity. It’s one of the few basketball teams (it was the ONLY team until Charlotte’s 2020 retro-rebranding) that uses pinstripes in their uniforms despite it being more associated with baseball rather than basketball. For my team, I wanted to bring that design element to the Lions’s jerseys.