Adidas Dribbler Typeface

Adidas asked me to draw a typeface for one season of their NBA apparel. It would be used only to typeset the names and locations of all teams and they wanted it to be heavily inspired by Herb Lubalin’s geometric sans serif lettering. I felt uncomfortable drawing something based so heavily on Lubalin’s work, so I pushed really hard to make it more of it’s own thing. I introduced details to make it more quirky, like width variations, more open terminals and a lot of custom code to shake things up when typesetting. It worked well on the sideline apparel, but it was a difficult project. Years later, Adidas got in touch and bought out all rights to the typeface and it began appearing in random places like their youth team uniform generator. Jeremy Mickel later developed a corporate typeface for all of Adidas and I’ve heard varying stories about Dribbler and a typeface drawn by my friend Joancarles Casasín somehow being a part of that. Brand typefaces have long, interesting lives.