Toronto Raptors

Born in 1995, the Toronto Raptors’ brand originally featured a red basketball-playing cartoon dinosaur paired with purple, black, and silver. The uniform history wasn’t much more traditional. The team’s inaugural uniforms featured that very cartoon dinosaur with jagged pinstripes in alternating silver and black on purple. In 1999, the team switched to a road uniform that was purple in the front… and black in the black. That template would stick around, but with red fronts and backs when Toronto dropped the purple in 2006. in 2015, the raptor would become implied when the team switched its primary logo to a roundel featuring a silver basketball with claw marks along the seams. My concept reimagines an evolution of the raptor that splits the difference between the campiness of the 90s design and the austerity of the current roundel mark. I started with a color scheme of red, black, silver, and metallic gold. The raptor no longer dons the jersey and shorts and is placed against a black maple leaf with red and gold accents above the RAPTORS wordmark. The raptors also appears by itself as an alternate logo, along with a stylized T. A basketball/raptor/maple leaf hybrid appears as a circular mark and as an icon to fill out the logo offerings. The typeface is a sleek, sharp, aggressive take on the traditional block font, containing angular stroke terminations and a highlight on the upper half on the letterforms. The uniforms pay homage to the WE THE NORTH mantra by placing the phrase on the inside of the back collar and with a subtle upward chevron pattern that points up to the contrasting shoulder panels. The striping on the shorts combines with the segmented waistband to create a T on each side of the shorts, while the standalone raptor appears on the left leg. The Association uniform is white with red type and shoulders, while the Icon (red) and and Alternate (black) uniforms feature silver typography, with black and red shoulders respectively. The Pride uniforms bring back the 90s with a modernization of the inaugural purple threads, complete with jagged pinstripes. The court combines red lanes and boundaries with black lines and a subtle two-tone design. WE THE NORTH appears at half-court along the boundary.