AT&T COTTON BOWL CLASSIC POSTERS AT&T
MICHAEL SCHWAB COTTON BOWL POSTERS

AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic

Gameday Graphics + Poster Series

One of the peculiar challenges of designing for a bowl game is that the campaign has to exist long before anyone knows which teams will actually be playing.

At Toolbox Studios, fellow creative director Stan McElrath and I began the 2007 AT&T Cotton Bowl work with that problem in mind. Since you can’t build a campaign around teams we couldn’t yet identify, Stan developed the idea of an archetypal player—a figure who could stand for the game itself. Once the matchup was known, team marks could simply be introduced into the finished poster. Other pieces, including the gameday tickets, had to go to press even earlier and were designed to work without them.

We knew exactly who we wanted to bring that player to life: Michael Schwab, one of my favorite illustrators—and graphic designers—I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.

Michael created a new figure for each of the 2007 and 2008 games, using the process behind so much of his extraordinary work: posing real models, photographing them to find the essential gesture and shadows, working through pencil drawings, then reducing the image to those beautifully controlled fields of shape and color that are unmistakably his. His work has an ability to feel simultaneously monumental and remarkably simple, which made it particularly well suited to an event with as much history as the Cotton Bowl.

Michael needed very little art direction of course. He is, after all, a consummate designer himself. My role became one of building the system around his illustration: developing the original pencil thumbnails that would go with the brief, working through composition and typography, integrating the then-new AT&T Cotton Bowl identity, and extending the finished artwork into the larger gameday experience.

Michael’s imagery became the visual language of the event, appearing across tickets, programs, media credentials, invitations, stadium graphics, hospitality pieces, and commemorative objects. The original Toolbox case study from that era even records some of the wonderfully specific applications: ticket-delivery boxes, hotel room keys, and a commemorative enamel pin.

The graphics package received an ADDY Award from the American Advertising Federation.