For the following season, we increased the size (8.5″ x 10.5″) and the page count (48!) to include hundreds of additional products. One of the Store Managers and I went through Fenway Park one cold winter day along with Wally The Green Monster and a photo crew. There we took hundreds of shots to include in the catalog. It was a great chance to see a lot of the “behind the scenes” parts of Fenway including the Batting Cage, the Locker Room and Francona’s office. Unfortunately, none of these photos made it into the catalog. The Red Sox were nice enough to give us free reign over a number of photographs they had taken over the previous couple of years. The image that adorns the cover of the catalog is one of these.

One of the biggest obstacles that we had to overcome was software. While I did all of the design work, the aforementioned manager typed in all of the text and prices. Unfortunately, she didn’t have Quark XPress. With the Winter Catalog, she would have to input her edits on my computer while I wasn’t there. For the 2006 Catalog, everything was designed in Photoshop. (I know, I know, don’t do text in Photoshop, but we didn’t have any other option.) Each two page spread was it’s own layered Photoshop file. These files ended up being huge. At the time, I was working on a standard PC, so I spent a lot of time waiting for files to open and save.

The 2006 Red Sox Team Store catalog was, at that point, one of the largest projects I had ever tackled on my own. One of my co-workers photographed all of the merchandise, and I did everything from prepping those photos to handing the files to the printer.

The first website that I designed at Twins was the first site I had developed using Dreamweaver. Before that I had been using Adobe GoLive. I’m glad that I made the switch before Adobe bought Macromedia and rendered GoLive useless. Back to the topic at hand, the first Twins site that I created showcased 13 different lines of caps that Twins was stocking for 2005. When they decided to pare down their line to four or five main lines, we decided to redesign the website. It’s been my belief that if you are going to have something that changes every year, you should change the look of your marketing materials. It should still have elements that carry over from one year to the next, but it reinforces that the customer is looking at something all new, not the same as what they looked at the previous year.

After a couple of false starts, the 2006 Twins website was to be site that mixes html and Flash. This gave me the opportunity to learn Flash. Much like Dreamweaver, I didn’t have anybody to show me how to use the program. It took a while to learn Flash, but once I cleared a couple of obstacles, everything started to move along.

The decision was made to have two different areas of the Twins website. In Stock items, items that would always be ready to ship, and Specialty items, lines of caps that were only available for a limited time. This side of the website was going to need constant updating. Once everything was in place, I set about designing the site. About 2/3 of the way through, a new edict was passed down that the Specialty side of the site was not going to happen. Also, I was to launch the website immediately. Unfortunately it wasn’t finished, and I was leaving for vacation the next day.

The site went live and I fixed a lot of it when I returned from my trip.

Both websites were leaps and bounds ahead of their predecessor. I also made the Flat Brim section look completely different than the rest of the site. These caps are aimed at a completely different market than the usual baseball cap buyers.

When you click on the image above, it will take you to a page that lives on my website. Any links that you may click on will bring you to the current Twins site. You may notice that some flash elements look different, and don’t behave the same way as the page I designed. After I left Twins, somebody went in and made some changes to the Flash buttons. Since this is not work that I did, I don’t want the credit or the blame for how the Twins site now looks.

Our main objective was to design caps that would be purchased in addition to Twins’ flagship line, The Franchise. Almost everyone wears a Franchise cap, and we needed to create caps that would make the customer buy additional caps.

Being a fan of “simple” cap design, I was looking for a cap that would appeal to me. The Incognito was the most successful cap that I developed. The embroidered logo on the visor was something that I came up with while trying to modify a previously established cap. Once I figured out that the stitching on the visor was leftover from the old days of making caps, I started to manipulate it. It seems like a simple idea, but I was the first one to do it. Since then, you can see this style of embroidery all over the place, including Reebok’s NBA Championship cap from last year. There is a great deal of pride in knowing that I developed something so successful that other companies were ripping it off.

The Hyde is another example of a simple cap. This was one of three versions of this cap that I developed. Sometimes it had a canvas patch, and sometimes it was a leather patch. Both had silkscreen printing on it. One leather version was in color, while the other had all-black printing (to simulate branding.) The frayed edges on the cap are there to give the cap a “broken in” feel. The leather strap in the back helped to tie the whole cap together. While this version doesn’t show it, the Hyde was one of Twins’ first caps that had an etched logo on the back strap buckle.

The Bubba is an example of a cap that I would never wear. It is a loud, in your face cap. Lots of team colors, lots of logos, lots of everything. There’s no doubt which team you support. I’ve found that this appeals to southern college football. This cap was designed when I was experimenting a lot with mesh. The mesh on this cap is the team’s secondary color (black) and it lies over the team’s primary color (orange). Unlike the other two caps, this is a structured cap with a velcro strap. It’s not a bad style, but it just isn’t for me.

It’s still fun seeing people walking around wearing caps that I designed. And it was a great opportunity to design caps that I would (and do) actually wear.