I have never been a football fan, really. When I was young, my older brother would watch it every Sunday — the Bears, his favorite — leaving me to pout in the couch as he mastered the remote and my weekend TV. Yes, I could have gone read or play outside but it was more fun to annoy him by throwing small tantrums while I focused on the game simply being over. In those days you had to wait, what felt like ages, for the scoreboard and time-remaining graphics, which at this point in history took almost 85% of the TV’s real estate when they finally came up. The settings were probably — and I’m making this up for the sake of prose — 128 pt. Univers Condensed, -200 tracking, 100% Yellow, just tune in to ESPN Classic any day and you’ll see. How times have changed…
Without getting into too many details, the changes of on-screen graphics are obvious: small type purporting every single possible combination of statistical information, real-time clocks counting down every second, flying beveled metallic things that morph and make sounds, runners at the bottom of the screen that display scores and news from other games… oh, and the score and time always on. Thank you.
As a kid who grew up with Atari, then Nintendo and ultimately Playstation I can understand how this shift has occurred. The current crop of young(er) NFL — and sports in general — viewers can handle the onslaught of on-screen graphics, in fact, I would think that they require it in order to stay interested in the game — otherwise it just seems, well, flat. Electronic Arts’ addictive John Madden series alone has shaped a whole generation of gamers (aka People) and has defined the new face of TV sports.
In 1998 a revolutionary addition was made to TV’s Football-watching experience: Sportvision’s 1st & Ten� yellow line. Quite simply, through rather complicated tech whiz-bang, a yellow line is always there for avid fans to know how far their team has to go to achieve the coveted first-and-ten. Simple, yet award-winning… Emmy no less. Even my brother noticed the addition, adding in good Spanish slang, ’Ta cabr�n which loosely translates to Fuckin’ cool.
Since then, networks have kept adding visual features to enhance the game — to the point of redundancy at times. Even riding the yellow line’s success by instituting a blue line that denotes the line of scrimmage. “Can we all agree that we know where the line of scrimmage is?” asks Richard Sandomir, in an article for The New York Times. And, lastly, there is the red line, marking the spot from where the kicker could make a safe kick goal. “Surely,” Sandomir jokes, “our TV sets will implode one day when all three lines merge.”
While fans enjoy the game, beer, chips and cheap dips, there are hordes of people hard at work behind the scenes — and in tricked-up, hi-tech trucks — to make the on-screen graphics come alive. The “Fox Box” — the box score in unexciting terms — seems to need to be operated by guys like Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack in Pushing Tin, brave, fearless and a little cuckoo.
Reality, of course, couldn’t be farther from the truth. In every issue, Fortune magazine highlights a somewhat obscure profession in their aptly named “You do What?” column. In the past, low-profile careers like Confetti Maker, Golf Ball Diver and Professional Tailgater have had the fortune of being brought to the limelight. In the most recent issue, a nod comes our way when, Mike Steavpack, a Fox Box Operator for this year’s Superbowl is featured. Good Mike, one assumes, responds to the “You do What?” question with “I’m a Super Bowl Graphic Designer”. What Mike does, he says, is “I’m responsible for all the information that appears in the Fox Box at the top of the screen during the Super Bowl.” So, technically, I would presume, somebody else did the actual design and Mike — who may or may not have a degree in graphic design or visual communications — simply punches in the numbers into a predetermined template, which, where I come from, we call The Production Guy.
I still don’t like football, I don’t gamble and the ads keep getting worse every year, so reasons to watch the Superbowl this Sunday are hard to come by. But this year, I have someone to root for, someone I can identify with, Production Guy or (the more correct) Broadcast Designer titles aside. This year, I’m rooting for Mike Steavpack.
Thanks to Nicole for bringing up the Fortune article during the morning meeting.
Hmmm... should this discussion come back around to the definition of "graphic design"? I just don't think what he does should be considered "design" work. This just further proliferates the confusion with the general public of what we do.
It is interesting that you posted this. Just this morning I was chatting with a fellow designer about how I remembered almost 10 years ago when CNN first began to have mutliple windows in a grid fashion on the screen displaying different kinds of data. It was information overload! At the time I wasn't even getting online (where the influence surely came from) so that kind of interface was completely new to me.
Of course now there are almost no stations that don't incorporate that kind of interface. When flipping through channels and I come accross one that doesn't... I think it just hasn't caught up with the times yet. (And then of course I admire whoever's decision it is for not following the pack.)
On Feb.04.2005 at 12:05 PM