HYPERBOLICALLY SEATTLE

Created during Design 376: Advanced Typography at the University of Washington.

A broadsheet publication and mobile typography layout created based on an interview I conducted with Drew Hamlet, Art Director for the Seattle Kraken NHL team. I decided to interview Drew Hamlet for my installment in this collection of interviews because I am fascinated by the world of sports branding, and a big hockey fan myself. I was incredibly interested to learn about the Seattle Kraken because the team was instated as an expansion of the NHL in 2021, which meant that the branding had to be created from scratch. I had an incredibly fun time working with the Seattle Kraken brand assets and learning how to infuse energy but maintain control in the way I laid out my publication. This project is a part of a larger collection of 19 interviews conducted by my classmates in Design 376: Advanced Typography, entitled “19 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Drop Out Of Design School.”

PROCESS

Before this project, I had no experience in publication design or any idea of how to balance laying out type and images in this format in a successful way. Initially, I struggled a lot with trying to create a “sporty” vibe and with editing my text down to a manageable amount.

An early cover draft, where I experimented with super condensed type.

Another early cover draft that was mostly typographical.

Way too much text here! I also was not integrating my images in a very productive or sensible way.

I learned a lot from my first critique about how I wanted to edit down my text and find a better way to incorporate my images. At this point, I knew I wanted to include more images of the overall Kraken brand, which includes everything from the player’s uniforms to the restaurant at their practice facility. I started experimenting with collaging my assets, which was an idea that made it to my final iteration.

The bottom spread was the one that resembled most closely my final iteration.

From those iterations, I received the critique that I needed to refine both how I set my body copy of type and how I arranged my collage. I also realized I needed to refine the type on my cover, because it was far more “pirate-y” than the Kraken is. I spent a lot of time adjusting my collage and layering images over one another to achieve that complex, sporty, yet professional look. At this point, my front and back cover were still generally unresolved, but closer to what I wanted them to be.

At this point, I realized I could bleed the front and back cover together, and resolved my visual problems by layering multiple images into each other to feature the image of the goalie, Phillipp Grubauer, amongst a close up of the logo and an image of center ice at Climate Pledge Arena (which is coincidentally also featured in the background of my inside spread). I refined the typography on both spreads to clean up the space and create more visual interest and balance. I decided to maintain a level of symmetry in my inside spread due to how visually complicated the layout of the images was, which I think worked well to create cohesion. Overall, I’m super pleased with my final result!

The final stage of this project was to create a mobile translation of our article. I chose to lay mine out as a standalone article rather than integrate it into a larger database. I also wanted to make sure I could maintain some of the energy of my broadsheet while keeping the layout clean and readable on a one-column mobile device. The mobile format allowed me to integrate GIFs and videos, which I really appreciated. That aspect was the one thing I wished I could’ve included in my broadsheet, as the in-game experience is so integral to the Kraken brand.

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