Tag Team

Client
NBCUniversal, LX News

Year
2020-2022

Tag Team was a short-form documentary-style news show that covered everything from intriguing pop culture topics to local news stories and grassroots movements.

Given the privilege of designing the logo/title and identity system, I sought to create a mark that would be stable, memorable and adaptable.

Producers
Fernando Hurtado, Janine Doyon, Cody Broadway, NBCU

Graphics, Animation
Hi-Tone Images

With the assortment of skillful producers listed above, each lent their talents in presenting and editing each program.

The following episode was one of Tag Team’s most impactful, reaching over 7,000 viewers in the L.A. area.

Tag Team Ep 2: Solving Food Deserts

Producer, Editor
Janine Doyon, Cody Broadway

Graphics, Animation
Hi-Tone Images

Logo/Title + Identity Brief

Origin sketches

For this LX News concept, I again worked within the parameters of their established brand standards. With a simple, direct title like ‘Tag-Team,‘ ideas filled my mind almost immediately as I began working on the title treatment.

I began exploring variations of both upper and lowercase lettering within the Montserrat typeface. Similar to MNFF, I wanted to generate a multi-functional, scalable shape that could be broken down into other modules.

Typography

After playing with different Montserrat fonts for a while, I landed on trying lowercase, italicized lettering for the Tag Team logo. I felt it would help convey the ‘fun,‘ ‘youthful‘ tone of Tag Team’s production-style.

Primary

Secondary

Color Palette

Keeping in line with the aforementioned ‘simplicity‘ of this design, applying this approach to the Tag Team color palette was no different. My goal became creating a two-tone graphic.

Logo/Style Explorations

Initially, I took the ‘Tag Team‘ title very literal and created iconography as such, seen below in iteration 1. Considering this approach to be ‘too literal‘ I made refinements and went back to my original idea of exploring the lowercased letters of Montserrat Black.

Going lowercase and italic allowed for a more definitive look, whereby I could implement the ‘fun, youthful‘ expression into the title. Abbreviating ‘Tag-Team‘ to ‘tt’ cemented the idea even more, as the crossbars organically connected together as I tracked them closer together. At this point, the idea of ‘tag-team‘ was subtly implied, yet far more effective.

Iteration 1

Iteration 2

Final result

Style Explorations

In the style frame phase, I ended up bringing back an old element or two to try (shown in style frames 1 & 2), but ultimately I decided toward simplicity yet again. Going directly to the logo, I thought it best to focus on deconstructing it as much as possible in order to create more modules. In addition, Style frame 3 illustrates my attempt to give each Tag Team episode it’s own unique iconography, based on the given subject-matter.

Style frame 1

Style frame 2

Style frame 3

Static Modules

After completing the Tag Team logo/title, I went straight into developing the requested collateral as shown below. The black/grey/White with yellow highlight color scheme proved to be effective and complimentary to the videos produced by Tag Team.

Tag Team Ep: The Flag and Us (Title-card)

Tag Team Ep: Solving Food Deserts (Title-card)

Tag Team Ep: Emoji Court (screen-grab)

Tag Team Ep: Emoji Court (screen-grab)

Animated Modules

In the end, we developed an adaptable, recognizable logo/title and identity for Tag Team that could be used in many ways, as shown below. Although LX News producers weren’t in need of anything more complex, I confidently assured them that we could always push the identity further, had they chosen to, as the simplicity in design had allowed for it.