Ryan Gorcey: Connecting People Through Storytelling
Graphic Design
From the grease board to the sketch pad to the screen, Ryan starts with a vision of his (or his client's) ideal end product and works backwards to figure out how to make it a reality. Forced to teach himself how to use Adobe Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop as a freshman high school newspaper editor, he pushed graphic design programs to their limit to find out just what he could do, and how he could achieve the look he wanted. Graduating to InDesign and Illustrator in college, he began creating logos, brands and visual identities, playing with retro aesthetics and updating classic looks. As a communications director, he would craft entire graphic campaigns for print, web and social, and vastly increased his knowledge base and skill set.
Product Design & Marketing
In June of 2024, the Los Angeles Dodgers released their second iteration of NIKE and MLB's league-wide City Connect uniform campaign.A month earlier, samples of the designs had leaked, and was coldly received by fans, who derisively labeled it the Funfetti Connect, likening it to a Funfetti Pop Tart or 1970s formica countertops.
NIKE claimed its City Connect 2.0 included a word mark that was a nod to the signage at the Dodgers' first home in Los Angeles: The L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Marketing copy also said the spatter sublimation on the jersey represented the stars dreamers shoot for, while the contrail and upward trajectory elements spoke "to the city’s pursuit of what’s above and beyond," a phrase more appropriate for a city with more of a connection to the space program, like Houston. While the set was an improvement over the previous iteration, Ryan felt like it missed some big opportunities to truly connect with the city of Los Angeles and the Dodgers' legacy there.
Ryan used the opportunity to perform a case study of what he would have done differently with not only the release, but the design itself. Click through the deck below to see the concept.