Circling Seattle Sports rebrands early into 2024
By Charles Hamaker
Seattle, WA – As we approach the month of May here in 2024, Circling Seattle Sports is officially announcing a rebrand that will change our look and signal a new era in our coverage of Seattle sports teams, from the professional level, to the minor-leagues and semi-pro teams, collegiately, and more that will come later on. For over two years we’ve been thinking about how to improve our look, whether that’s in our posts, our videos, our social media presence, but the logo is something that needs to pop and be recognizable. The CSS letters you’ve seen previously had done their job as we began as a small podcast, but with the heights we continue to reach and the dreams we are pursuing, a change needed to be made. With that, our new look helps serve as a launching point for what should be a major calendar year of 2024 as we seek to continue as a sports media outlet that does what nobody else is doing for Seattle and the teams that call it home.
Our new look
As you can see through the posts of the base logo and through the progress photos below this, we wanted to do a few things with our rebrand: keep it somewhat simple with the CSS letters to detail our name (Circling Seattle Sports, in case you needed a reminder), while also picking an icon of our region to represent what we’re doing. The Space Needle came to mind, but it’s overdone, and we quite frankly didn’t want to blend in with other outlets and designs that have used the needle, even if it is very iconic for the city of Seattle. The second choice that immediately came to mind was Mount Rainier, an icon in its own right that pushes further than just the Seattle city limits. Considering that our coverage isn’t strictly limited, in terms of the “mainstream” teams or the location of those teams, it made sense and gave us a beautiful feature piece to include with our letters. The beautiful blue and green that you’ll see in our wordmark are colors directly taken from pallets of the mountain and the Puget Sound water itself, wanting to stay as close as we can to the local aspect of our area rather than basing our colors off the teams we cover. While the purple and gold for our college division account comes directly from the University of Washington, even if we have plans to cover other universities at some point, the red you’ll see for our Futures coverage also comes from the red of different plant life around Rainier as well. As you may be able to tell, we’re deeply interested in keeping with the “local” theme here.
A look at the different stages that our new logo went through, as detailed by resident designer Ethan Davis.
Our history
With the rebranding of Circling Seattle Sports and how we’re pushing forward with new aspects of our coverage, there might not be a better time to document our history and progress since the beginning. This all started out in late December of 2019 as a podcast episode, because of two factors that took place within the same week: a writing class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington had a final project submission option of a podcast episode, and a different classes professor told me that I had a voice for radio. The podcast started there and became a weekly thing after that. Slowly, after beginning with just the Seahawks, we started to add different teams and, in that process, added two high school friends of mine: Bennett Bucholtz and Omi Salisbury, who graduated from O’Dea High School in 2019 with me. The topics and discussion grew as we were talking about nearly every pro team in the area. As 2020 kept us all inside, I wanted to try and expand what I was doing with the podcast by interviewing the athletes and staff members of these teams that we were talking about, beginning with O’Dea and Washington Husky alum Myles Gaskin. I had actually met Myles at an O’Dea basketball game right before the shutdown, and asked him about an interview, which eventually became a two-hour conversation over the phone.
The interviews grew, as I reached out to these athletes and staff members just about any way that I could, and it was fun to speak with names such as Rick Rizzs, Sofia Huerta, Lofa Tatupu, and Dan Hughes amongst others. In early 2021, I was asked by Seattle Reign FC (OL Reign at the time and playing at Cheney Stadium) if I wanted to cover a match of theirs in person. It was a big change from what I had been doing, which was just the podcast and interviews at the time, but I wasn’t going to turn the opportunity down. We didn’t have any photographers, and our website was poorly made on WIX, but it was something. The first few months were my articles, that I wrote on pen and paper at the games and then put onto the website once I got home from the long bus ride back from Tacoma, with cover photos from my phone in the press box. Eventually I was able to get an opportunity to cover the Sounders and Kraken, and the teams built from there. More articles, we began our social media presence, and our photographer team began to grow. It was still somewhat new, and I had a lot to learn, but Circling Seattle Sports was becoming what you know it as today.
In late 2021, we joined the Converge Media team to take our podcast and make it a weekly show on YouTube. Outside of a handful of occurrences (Weather, illness, slept in once), we’ve been extremely consistent at our weekly episodes on Monday’s at 4PM PST, and have steadily improved our product with more to come throughout this year. We took our access from six of Seattle’s eight pro sports teams and added the Mariners, still searching to cover Seahawks in person. Our photo team added some core members, such as our lead photographer Liv Lyons, and we really began to grow our audience in 2022 and 2023. Long days, sleepless nights, and lots of networking, and we’re where we are today. There’s more work to be done, lots to unveil, and certainly more to write about, but it’s already been a bit of a wild ride so far. With the excitement we have planned and how much more we want to do with Circling Seattle Sports, re-inventing our look to match the hard work was a must, and that’s how we got to this rebrand today.
We drew inspiration from the iconic Mount Rainier, the tallest mountain in Washington and the Cascade Range. It’s always fun for those in the Seattle area to say that the “mountain is out,” and you can see how we took direct inspiration from it for our new look. (Photo by Caleb Riston)
What’s next for us?
With this major announcement of our rebrand, a new look and the sign of future excitement regarding what you’ll see from us, there will be at least three announcements to come in the next few weeks regarding new aspects of Circling Seattle Sports. While I was already bad at holding on to the secret of this rebrand that you’ve just learned more about, these upcoming announcements will be more top secret until they come out, with a few exceptions in the form of teasers. Be on the lookout for what those announcements may be, as we continue through an exciting year of 2024 and prepare for the jam-packed Spring and Summer sports seasons here in the amazing city of Seattle and the areas that surround it. They may not quite be what you’re expecting, but I assure you that what we’re adding to Circling Seattle Sports will make us better as an outlet and will continue to add to what we do on a day-to-day basis. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your support, and I can’t wait to share more news with you all. Never be afraid to stop me in public to have a conversation or ask a question, as I’ve always strived to be someone you can connect with on person too as opposed to just on your screens.