NBA teams
Matt Walks, ESPN.com 9y

Reimagining NBA mascots as cartoon characters

Baboon Creation wants to comfort you if your team is on the outside looking in during next week's NBA Finals.

On Thursday, the two-man, Montreal-based design firm released a batch of 16 reimagined NBA mascots that look like they were taken straight out of "Looney Tunes." (Seriously, the Rockets logo looks like something Wile E. Coyote would order from an Acme magazine.)

We caught up with Pablo Echeverri, creative director of Baboon, to ask about their inspiration, process and the possibility we'll see more down the line.

ESPN: How did this begin to come together?

Echeverri: We really like hockey, basketball and soccer. We’ve done a lot of logo redesigns and graphic art. For these, we just started brainstorming and playing around with the mascots, keeping the color palettes the same. Some, like the Celtics’ logo, were obviously reflections of a team’s existing logo, while others -- like the Wizards -- were very literal translations.

Our first batch of six was maybe two weeks ago. We liked what we saw, so we did another six, and that was when we started hitting walls -- the Knicks, the Lakers, some of these are very hard to visually represent.

They take about two days per logo. It starts with a couple hours of brainstorming and drawing, then we retrace in Illustrator and play with the color palettes. I would say all of them took three weeks to put together.

What has the response been like?

Echeverri: We posted them yesterday, and people seem to really like them. We don’t really care if people like them -- well, of course we want people to say, “Hey, these are great,” but if they don’t and these are forgotten, that’s OK too. We mostly did these for us.

Do you have a favorite?

Echeverri: My associate says the Orlando Magic magician is his favorite. For me, it’s the wizard, but the Raptors’ one is pretty nice too.

Will we be seeing another batch in the future?

Echeverri: Already on reddit there are comments asking for more, especially the Lakers, so I think we can do the other ones. It won’t happen anytime soon, though, because we have actual work to do. (laughs)


For more crafty sports design, Baboon Creation also whipped up a batch of minimalist NHL logos.

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