UC Students Tackle Super-Sized Challenge: Designing for the Super Bowl

University of Cincinnati graphic design senior Justin Curtis, 24, of Middletown, Ohio, and fellow student Sarah Dunn, 21, of Kenwood, are first-string designers, picked to help create the graphics that will fill the city of Phoenix, the Phoenix airport and the celebrated University of Phoenix Stadium (in Glendale) on Super Bowl Sunday.

It is football’s biggest day, and the smallest of design teams makes it all happen in terms of the “look” of the game.

That’s where Dunn and Curtis come in. Both are students in UC’s internationally recognized College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, and both have worked this past year at Infinite Scale Design Group in Salt Lake City as part of their required cooperative education quarters. There, they huddled with a professional team consisting of three other designers to create and craft the designs needed for the Super Bowl. (Other members of that tight-knit design team include two UC design alums and former co-op students Zach Norman and Travis Lee.)

“It’s hard for people who haven’t done this kind of work to imagine it,” said UC’s Dunn. “It even amazes me that a design only inches high on my computer screen will now become a design to apply to a wall that is literally the size of a football field. In so many ways, it’s the biggest project I’ve ever worked on.”

Both Dunn and Curtis (who is also known as ‘Who Dey Justin’ because of his love for the Bengals) feel they met their end goal, which was to have the “best dressed” stadium and city possible for the Super Bowl. In all, Curtis and Dunn contributed to the designs for

• Stadium graphics for the field wall and upper desk layers.

While Dunn has completed her professional co-op quarters with Infinite Scale and will watch the big game (and her designs) at a Hyde Park Super Bowl party, Curtis will still be working come Super Bowl Sunday. In the days leading up to Feb. 3, he will be in Arizona helping to physically place all the design work. It’s a last-minute rush job because the final AFC and NFC competitors are only known two weeks before the big game.

That means the Infinite Scale team must rush to have the designs manufactured with the correct team emblems – those of the New York Giants and New England Patriots – and then put them in place.

Said Curtis, “I might not even have the chance to watch the game because I’ll be working a lot to get all the designs up in time. There might be small fixes needed even during the game.”

He’s surprisingly OK with the fact that he might be working during the game. Curtis admitted, “If the Bengals were playing, that would be a different story. Then, I’d absolutely have to watch… .”

Then, maybe it’s a good thing for Curtis’ career that his beloved Bengals aren’t playing since he really wanted these co-op work terms to design for the  Super Bowl. “I definitely wanted this,” he stated, adding, “My friends and family are jealous that I get to participate in the Super Bowl like this. It’s been a great professional assignment, and I’ve loved being trusted with so much by the designers that work here. I haven’t wanted to let them down.”

Dunn agreed, “The Super Bowl is American culture. It’s a great event, and you want all the designs associated with it to be great too. Infinite Scale had such faith in us to produce good work. That allowed us to have faith in ourselves. We just rolled with every challenge that came along. We didn’t fumble anything.”

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