Jacksonville Jaguars
A new head of marketing arrived at the Jaguars and saw something worth doing. Campaign work, most of it built around ticketing, had been developed independently each time it came up. Every push was a fresh creative approach. Individually they were fine. Together they didn't add up to a team, because nothing underneath them said what the Jaguars were.
Bravely was brought in as the consulting arm to solve it: define the brand ethos, then build the system that would carry it into a season and the seasons after.
We started with a positioning document, not a moodboard: what the franchise actually is, where it sits nationally versus locally, and how that ties back to the animal itself. Ideated it with the client rather than presenting at them, because a brand ethos nobody in the building helped build is one nobody in the building defends.
A custom display face built on a licensed commercial base, carried across every medium for years. Photo treatment, multiple texture and graphic packages, and the supplemental elements that turn a position into something you can actually art-direct with.
Executions across web, banners, printed stadium signage, video board animation and treatment, and social. Directed photo shoots and set the visual guidance for marketing materials. A system that only exists in the bible isn't a system; it has to survive contact with a real season.
The brand bible had to work for internal teams and outside vendors equally, without me in the room to interpret it. That was the whole test, and the reason it's still running six seasons later.
A custom display face built on a licensed commercial base, carrying the whole system. It had to work at the scale of a headline and at the scale of a stadium wall, which are not the same problem. Around it: photo treatment, jungle textures, and the supplemental elements that let someone art-direct with the idea rather than just apply it.
The typeface is the load-bearing piece. Everything else in the system, from the photo treatment to the lockups, defers to it.
A look without a voice is just decoration. Soul and Swagger is the brand book I wrote to fix the Jaguars' voice and ethos: who they are, how they carry themselves, and how that has to read whether it's a hype video or a staff email. It gave Scratch and Claw a personality to answer to, so the whole system sounded like one team instead of ten.
Soul and Swagger, the Jaguars brand voice book, and the ethos the rest of the work had to match.
The system had to move, too. Weekly social cuts in the Scratch and Claw voice, built for the platforms the audience actually lived on: vertical for stories, square for the feed, wide for everywhere else.
Square cuts for the feed, in the Scratch and Claw voice. Muted loops here; these ran with sound on social.
The biggest test of the system, and the least forgiving. Stadium wall signage running the length of the field, banners, and the approach graphics that pull fans toward the gates. The concept ran a jungle presence on the exterior and let the brand colors build as you moved inward, so arriving at the field read as being brought into the light. Past the gates it kept going: murals, out-of-home, merchandise people paid for, wallpapers they set on their own phones.
The signage extended the branding established for the 2021 season into the gameday experience itself, and the same system carried out past the stadium into the city.
An NFL franchise's brand touches more surfaces than almost any other kind of client. Scratch and Claw had to work on a phone and on the side of a stadium, in a fifteen-second video board loop and in a printed sponsor deck, in the hands of internal designers and outside vendors who had never met each other. Every execution was a test of whether the system was actually a system or just a look.
The engagement ran two seasons, starting in 2021. The identity is still in use six seasons later.
The brand wasn't broken. It was unwritten. Nothing said what the Jaguars stood for, so every campaign answered that question again from scratch, and answered it a little differently each time.
We wrote a positioning document before we drew anything: what the franchise is, where it actually sits in the national conversation versus the local one, and how all of that ties back to the animal on the helmet. A jaguar is not the biggest cat. It has the strongest bite relative to its size, hunts alone, and is rarely the one anybody's watching. That is the team. The voice came out of that and the theme named itself.
Underdog asks for sympathy. This doesn't. The gap between how good we are and how much attention we get isn't a complaint, it's fuel. Never plead the case. Let the work carry the chip.
Texture, wear, and teeth. If a line or a layout would look at home on a brand with four times the media budget and none of the edge, it isn't ours. Polish is the easiest thing to buy and the fastest way to disappear.
Local isn't a limitation to market around. It's the only thing thirty-one other teams can't copy. The brand should be legible to a national audience and unmistakable to the people who live here.
Nothing gets claimed that hasn't been done. The brand talks about what's ahead and what it costs, not about glory it hasn't earned yet. Swagger is fine; making things up isn't.
Every franchise wants to be the Hero. The Hero alone is generic, and worse, it's a claim you have to keep winning to justify. The Outlaw is what makes it specifically Jacksonville: the chip, the teeth, the willingness to be the team nobody picked. The Everyman is what keeps it from being posturing, because the brand belongs to a city that gets overlooked right alongside its team.
Not the underdog story, which begs. The predator story, which doesn't.
The jaguar isn't the biggest cat in the jungle. It has the strongest bite for its size, it hunts alone, and almost nobody is watching it work. Jacksonville is a small market that the national conversation forgets between highlights, and the team carries that same chip. So the brand stopped asking to be taken seriously and started sounding like something you'd be unwise to overlook. Everything downstream came from that sentence: the voice, the type, the textures, the way we shot people, the reason it still holds up six seasons later.
Seasons the standard has held since launch.
Scratch and Claw shipped as a positioning platform, a voice, a custom typeface, and a brand bible teams could actually use, and it has outlasted the two-season engagement that built it by three times over.
Built to be handed off. Internal teams and outside vendors work from one source of truth, which is why it has survived six seasons of people who were not in the room when it was made.
Writing the brand standard was the easy half.
Nobody at a client organization reports to a consultant. You arrive with a mandate from one executive and no authority over anyone else, and on day one the brand bible is just a PDF that a lot of talented, opinionated people did not ask for. Some of them have been there a decade. They have their own instincts, and their instincts have been working fine without you.
So the actual work was persuasion, one person and one decision at a time. Not enforcing the standard, since I had no power to enforce anything. Making the standard useful enough, and making the case well enough, that people reached for it because it made their own work better. Every time it held on a project I wasn't in the room for, that was the real deliverable.
Six seasons later it's still in market. I was there for two of them. I'd argue the other four matter more, since anything that needs its author standing next to it isn't really a standard, it's just supervision with a document attached.
ADCOLOR
Lead digital designer since 2021. One voice carried from a social post to a projected animation on a venue wall.
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