School Mascot Rebrand Project
ETSU’s Bucky the Buccaneer Redesign
This project began as what was called “The Johnson City Project”, a student project for upperclassmen in the Digital Media program to create a concept for a marketing event, social event, or public works project to be presented to representatives of the City of Johnson City. The idea me and my partner, Kurt Woodward had was to create a brand revitalization for ETSU’s school mascot, Bucky, that would include a statue that would be built in downtown Johnson City.
We decided that I would be in charge of the redesign of Bucky and the creation of 2D collateral related to the rebrand project, while Kurt would take my design and translate it to a 3D model concept for the statue.
Both of us agreed that we wanted Bucky to be “modernized” and to be given a new design that would convey him as having a unique personality that would appeal to a typical college-aged audience. As seen on the image to the right, I began with a first design that was most similar to his current official design, but after I did more research on the character for his backstory, I pushed the design further into a “rugged and adventurous” direction.
Development Art
For my part, a large portion of this project was focused on research and essentially compiling all of my findings into what we would use as Bucky’s official backstory, which I wrote and edited into a mock-up plaque that would be a part of the statue. In practice, I was adapting the text of what I could find of Bucky’s in-character backstory on some rather obscure ETSU websites and reinterpreting it to be more concise and most productive to our goal of appealing to a modern generation of students.