#TheReturn Derrick Rose Adidas Campaign is ALL IN with explosive, engaging creative!

The multimedia campaign for Derrick Rose's new shoes and apparel release entitled #The Return is an example of outstanding brand design, creative, and social media fan engagement. 

The D Rose 3 collection introduces new shoes and apparel all featuring one of the best athlete logos I think I have ever seen. 

This logo is not just fantastic, it symbolizes a great deal about the player and the man it represents as explained by the head designer of the shoe himself:

"When you pick up the Rose 3.0, the first thing you notice is a brand-new signature logo. This is not just a logo—this is a symbol representing Rose and his life story." - Rob Lee

The web site utilizes a slick responsive design, stunning artwork (also featured on the apparel), powerful video and a unique way for fans to show support.

By using the hashtag created for the campaign, #TheReturn, fans can see their tweets and photos posted to the site and watch the believe counter soar high into the millions.  

Some great creative work and execution on this campaign of true heart. Now let's see if D Rose can amaze us all again this season on the planks. I believe. 

5 Stunning Responsive Athlete Websites

Responsive web design is the future. I wondered last night how many top athletes have gone to responsive websites for their personal brands. I started looking at the 2013 Forbes top paid athletes list to search for some good examples. As logical as I thought it would be that a correlation of financial success to top technology would exist, I discovered that was not the case.

Many of the top paid athletes as you would assume have very nice websites. Serena Williams, Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant all have very attractive and highly functional websites. I found it to be a challenge however, to find great examples of responsive athlete websites.

Here are 5 that I found outstanding:

1. Usain Bolt - http://usainbolt.com

The fastest man on Earth might also have the most amazing athlete website design.

2. Rory McIlroy - http://www.rorymcilroy.com

I absolutely love the image scroller on this site, beautiful photography + story = high emotional appeal.

3. Paul Rodriguez - http://prod84.com

PROD has big things happening in his career at the moment. He announced recently that he would be leaving his long time board sponsor to take more ownership of his brand. Official website, check.

4. Jens Lehmann - http://www.jenslehmann.com/

Jens Lehmann is an accomplished German footballer. His site tells a great story and supports a compelling, multifaceted brand presence.

5. Nyjah Hutson - http://nyjah.com

I was excited to see Nyjah Huston with such a great website. At 18 years old and the highest prize winning skateboarder in history, the story of this brand is young and exciting, just like the man himself.

Three Awesome Responsive Sports Websites

The Sports world has been known to be slow about embracing new digital technologies. With all of the emphasis on social media lately we can't forget about the new design revolution that is responsive web design.

Here are my top 3 sports sites that utilize responsive web design. 

MMQB- Monday Morning Quarter Back is a great new site with awesome content and great responsive design. 

Nascar - Nascar has been a digital super-star in the sports world. They continue to be cutting-edge with their responsive site design.

Dallas Mavericks - The first team site to go responsive.

As I have mentioned before, the responsive revolution is important for sports because sports fans especially want their content on all of their devices, all the time. With responsive web design, the experience from website to tablet to phone can all be the same. Imagine the sports content sites as you know them working more like smart phone apps on your desktop. That is indeed where it is all headed, and these sites have arrived.

Mavs.com, The first responsive NBA team site

The NBA introduced the first responsive team site in sports with the launch of the all new Dallas Maverick's Mavs.com site. 

The site follows the flat design approach with a left-hand side, fly-out navigation. The site is fully responsive with sleek transitions as you navigate pages that appear to the scroll to the precise place for you on click release.

Lately many design folks subscribe to the idea that the best kind of design is the kind you don't notice. The design and user-interface on the new Mavs.com site is so intuitive and effortless that it falls into this category of great design.

I think it is safe to say that there was some risk in being the first team and league to go with this new modern approach to web site layout design. Sports fans are not the most accepting of change and neither are sports team front-office folks, usually. 

Up until last year, the NBA ran all of it's sites on a very outdated custom CMS called Elcid. They finally switched to Drupal, and since Drupal is open source, we can expect to see more NBA teams going in the responsive direction with their team sites. 

The responsive revolution is important for sports because sports fans especially want their content on all of their devices, all the time. With responsive web design, the experience from website to tablet to phone can all be the same. Imagine the team sites as you know them working more like apps on your desktop. That is indeed where it is all headed, and the Dallas Mavericks have arrived.

Congrats to the Mav's and Mav's fans everywhere. This site will help make this a really fun season to be a Dallas fan! 

Winsipedia - College Football stats like you have never seen before!

I am really excited to share this outstanding sports data site I recently discovered:

Winsipedia.com.

Winsipedia.com is a comprehensive collection of college football all time wins, in a visually stunning easy to compare format. The homepage (pictured above) also features some notable winning top fives including National Championships and Bowl Games. It also gives you a look at winning beyond the games with an NFL Draft picks and Heisman honors section.

The BEST part about this site, in my opinion, is the design and presentation of all of these great collections of data. See the beautiful bar graph below that shows the teams measuring up in terms of Heisman winners.

http://www.winsipedia.com/ranking/heisman-winners

You may or may not be able to find this kind of info elsewhere on the web one way or another, but no where will you find it so easy to access, so comparable, and so consumable and ultimately useful anywhere else.

My favorite part of the site is the Compare Teams page. Here you can match two teams side-by-side and compare many aspects of their all time success. This feature alone could suck hours away from any college football fan who enjoys stats and rivalries. Below is an example of a match-up. I picked a rivalry that is close to my fan-hood.

With college football now in full swing for 2013, having this site on your bookmarks bar is a winning call, regardless of the "expert" predictions on your team. Check it out and share it with your friends. It is sure to be the kind of tool to inspire great smack talk, more accurate conversation and powerful bragging material!