You may have heard that this is a big week for the San Francisco 49ers, as they have the third pick in the 2021 NFL Draft, which kicks off Thursday night. But that’s not all. This season will mark the team’s 75th Anniversary, and to celebrate, they unveiled a new logo to start off the week. The logo will be on the 2021 Draft jerseys and in-season jerseys, as well as on all game balls and coins for home games.
“…[N]aturally the anniversary signifies the diamond anniversary, so that’s where our heads were at,” said Art Director, Aaron Llavore. “We explored a bunch of shapes first, but we instantly knew the diamond shape would fit best. We thought the shape just framed the numbers well…[T]he biggest inspiration was the 75th anniversary logo for the NFL, which was the last championship season jersey [for the 49ers]. So, that was very natural to us, so we kept exploring the diamond shapes. We had a bunch that we worked with and a bunch of fonts to work with. It was kind of a long process.”
A forever kind of franchise 💎https://t.co/WlY2yeoZG5 | #FTTB pic.twitter.com/IIR8L4QGf7
— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) April 26, 2021
It was a process that began in 2019, when Chief Marketing Officer Alex Chang tasked his team to start thinking about the future. It started as the 49ers were working towards a playoff run and an eventual trip to Super Bowl 54. Enter Brandon Tam, who is now a graphic designer with the organization. In 2019, Tam was a college student with a project and that project was to work on a 75th Anniversary logo for the San Francisco 49ers.
“…[W]e hired a new designer, Brandon Tam, who kind of cold emailed us in 2019,” Llavore said. “He was still in college and he had this big project that he went in on and it was the 75th season campaign, as if he worked in our office, and he sent it to probably half a dozen people or maybe more. And we were, ‘Who is this guy?’ This whole 12 page document, a PDF of all these logo iterations he already had. But, interesting enough when we hired him, we were looking for someone in December…Fast forward to today, he’s the guy who kind of took the baton and just engineered the logos with all the details that he was thinking of.”
Two years may sound like a lot of time to get a logo done, but with all the factors that go into it, it’s not as long as it seems.
“We knew just working with the NFL and also with Nike, with the uniform changes that have to happen well in advance…we felt that pressure right up front,” Llavore said. “…[W]e knew we had that, but we knew, we had that kind of pressure to build a logo and send it out. We sent out the final logo to the NFL to put on the patch May, 2020.”
Lookin' good squad! 💯
Our 75th anniversary logo patches made their TV debut on @gmfb this morning 💎 #FTTB pic.twitter.com/EtbXSSCN1F
— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) April 26, 2021
And now it’s April 2021 and the campaign is launched.
“…[O]nce we sent it off, then we had to create the brand guidelines, set the expectations, like what we could do with the logo for our partners or whatnot,” Llavore said. “And, then start to brainstorm what our website will look like…and how it all kind of flows together. That took a long time. And, everyone, the design team to the digital team had a hand in it….[E]very time you launch a brand campaign, it feels like we all birthed a brand. That’s the way it feels. And now that it’s out in the wild, you got to like nurture it and take care of it. So, that’s kind of where we are. It’s a newborn right now so we got to keep feeding it.”
The full team that made it happen is:
Alex Chang – CMO
Aaron Llavore – Art Director
Christine Zambetti – Manager, Graphic Design
Brandon Tam – Graphic Designer
Allie Dicken – Director, Brand Marketing
Tyler Killingsworth – Senior Coordinator, Brand Marketing
And now 49ers fans, it’s just about Draft time.
*Photos provided by 49ers.com