SB Fitness

SB Fitness sells finished sublimated uniforms and athletic apparel to schools — primarily across Mississippi when I was contracting with them. Shane Butler, the founder, owns the manufacturing access and the school relationships. What he needed was a designer who could turn a school's brand — colors, mascot, mark — into a complete kit that would actually look good when the players walked onto the floor.

The brief on each new project was as straight as it sounds: design the kit. School colors. School mascot. Position numbers, names, logos in the right places. Make the team want to wear it.

The work underneath the brief was where the craft showed up. A sublimated uniform is not a t-shirt. It's a full-coverage edge-to-edge graphic design problem with print constraints, fabric constraints, jersey-IA conventions, and a customer base that knows exactly what looks right and what looks like a clearance-bin design. And by the time the engagement matured, the brief expanded — from individual game kits to complete athletic apparel programs covering everything a school's basketball program would actually wear across a season.

There's a reason most school-team uniforms blur together. Sublimation is forgiving on the manufacturing side, which means it's easy to dump a clipart mascot onto a colored shell and ship it. The default is generic. Schools accept it because the alternative is no new uniforms.

Every kit I designed for SB had at least one design move that wasn't generic. A side-panel architecture borrowed from the team's mascot, not a stock chevron. A typography system pulled from the school's identity, not from the same Google Font everyone else uses. A color treatment that gave the away kit visual weight equal to the home kit instead of just inverting it.

The argument with Shane was simple: schools that get a uniform that doesn't look like every other team's uniform talk about it, repost it, and come back next season. That's the bet that justifies the design time. Across a four-year run and dozens of designs, that bet held.

Side-panel architecture as a brand carrier

Most team kits treat the side panel as decoration. Stripe, chevron, color block — pick one, apply across the league. I treated the side panel as the place where the team's specific identity lives. Aberdeen carries a deliberate negative-space chevron breaking off the shorts hem; South Pontotoc runs a tribal-cougar detail down the side that ties to the school's Cougars mark; Itawamba lives in a tight outline-and-piping system that lets the snakeskin fabric texture do the heavy lifting; Kossuth uses an arrowhead silhouette that points to the diamond-bordered school mark on the cuff.

The principle is that side panels are visible from every camera angle on the floor. When a parent watches the game on a stream from baseline, they don't see the front number — they see the side panel. That panel should communicate the brand, not borrow from a template.

Typography pulled from the school, not the marketplace

The Aberdeen wordmark uses a cursive treatment with bevel detail that connects to the school's existing identity. Itawamba's "ITAWAMBA" runs in an outline-only typographic treatment that lets the snakeskin fabric texture read through the letterforms. Coahoma uses an italicized signature-style script for "Coahoma" that pairs against bold serif numerals. Kossuth carries a refined cursive "Kossuth" wordmark that nods to the school's traditional identity. Walnut runs a clean condensed sans for "WALNUT" with a heavy red number behind a school-supplied wildcat illustration on the back.

Each school has its own visual culture. The kit's job is to live inside that culture, not impose a Nike-template-derived voice on top of it. The typography decision on every project started by looking at what the school already used — yearbook covers, gym wall paint, social media headers — and pulling from there.

Color systems that earn the away kit

A common laziness in school uniform design is treating the away kit as the home kit's color-flip. White instead of color, or color instead of white, with everything else identical. The result is two halves of one design, not two designs.

Aberdeen ships home and away in two genuinely distinct color treatments — the white kit reads light and confident; the dark kit reads heavy and disciplined, with the side-panel piping and accent stripes carrying different weights on each. Kossuth runs in two colorways where the secondary detailing genuinely shifts. The point isn't to force novelty into the away kit; it's to make sure the away kit was designed, not just inverted.

Special-occasion drops that hold the brand

Itawamba commissioned a pink-on-navy variant for a special game during the season — a separate design from the snakeskin home and away. The special drop didn't borrow the snakeskin treatment or the regular Itawamba "I" mark. It got its own typography weight, its own color story, and its own front-of-jersey lockup. That's correct: a special drop should look special. Borrowing from the regular kit reduces the moment to a costume change. Designing it from the ground up makes it feel like the school showed up differently for that night.

By the time the SB engagement reached Aberdeen, the brief stopped being "design a kit" and started being "design the entire program."

The Aberdeen Bulldogs basketball capsule covers the home and away game uniforms, the team's full warmup and training stack — basketball compression tights, joggers, branded hoodies, long-sleeve hydro-tech shooting shirts in two colorways, a long-sleeve performance crew — plus coach polos in three colorways, and a team backpack carrying the school's "A" mark in the maker-mark slot.

That kind of head-to-toe program is harder than it looks. The same brand identity has to work at multiple weights and on completely different garment shapes — slim cursive script on a game jersey, heavy condensed display type on a hoodie chest, varsity arched type on a long-sleeve performance shirt, simplified silhouette of the mark on a backpack pocket. Holding the system together across that range is the design problem. Aberdeen's capsule is the most complete answer in the SB body of work to "what does it look like when one designer owns the whole program."

Each design shipped in two formats: the flat print-ready vector artwork that goes to sublimation, and the rendered presentation mockup Shane used to sell the work into the school. The vector files were structured for the sublimation process — color-separated where needed, layered to handle front/back/short/sleeve panels independently, and built to scale without artifacts at full kit size.

The presentation mockups were rendered using SportsTemplates.net's 8K-quality jersey mockup system. The mockups belong to the platform; the kit design dropped onto them is mine. That distinction is part of why the Hall of Fame placements are credible — what's being voted on is the design, not the underlying 3D rendering.

The work shipped. The schools wore the uniforms. Aberdeen, Itawamba, South Pontotoc, Coahoma, Kossuth, Walnut, and other Mississippi programs played seasons in kits I designed.

The recognition piece is the part that's verifiable in public: the SportsTemplates.net Hall of Fame is a community-voted gallery — designs submitted using SportsTemplates' mockup library, ranked by votes from the global sports-design community. The South Pontotoc Cougars kit landed at 52 votes, sitting alongside Warriors throwback concepts, Nike Hornets court designs, and AS Roma third-kit redesigns at the top of the page. Several other designs from the SB body of work earned Hall of Fame placements over the years, all attributed to my account ericbelldesigns.

That kind of community vote is rare validation in the apparel-design space. Manufacturers contract dozens of designers; most of the work stays inside the contract and never gets seen by anyone outside the school that ordered it. Hall of Fame placements are public proof that the kits held up against pro-team-quality concept work — judged by people who design jerseys for a living.

The SB engagement is wrapped. Shane's manufacturing operation went one direction, my consultancy went another, and the chapter closed. The body of work sits in my archive — six schools' worth of named identity work, a complete head-to-toe athletic apparel program, and a handful of Hall of Fame placements that survive as public proof. If you're building an apparel brand or running a manufacturing operation that needs a designer with this kind of body of work behind them, the catalog is the answer to "can he actually deliver."