Basler Design

12/06/2025

We’re thrilled to unveil the bold new identity for Joey Greany Sports Performance—a powerhouse in youth athletic development led by Kansas City Royals Strength & Conditioning Coach, Joey Greany.

12/06/2025

Designed to inspire the next generation of elite athletes, this brand system captures the intensity, discipline, and faith-driven purpose at the heart of Joey’s training philosophy. The mark features a dynamic vertical crest built from the JG initials, with a subtle cross integrated into the form—a nod to the strong spiritual foundation woven throughout Joey’s message to young athletes.

12/06/2025

We’re proud to help shape a visual identity that reflects Joey’s mission: empowering kids ages 10–18 with the strength, speed, and confidence to compete at the highest level.

08/17/2022

Continuing the poster series—we're now up to 1997-98. In 1997 Photoshop had matured to version 4. While the app is hardly comparable to what we use for editing today, it also hardly compared to previous versions (and that's a good thing) which were very slow and limited in features.

The images on this piece were once again shot by John C. Thomas. I cannot recall whether these were digital shots or film. My guess is that these were still shot on film.

Once again we took advantage of every new feature that the software offered. Even still, many things were a challenge. One of the more complex features of this design was placing the players inside and/or behind the various steel cages. John's skill in knowing what we needed and how best to go about things helped a bunch. For example, the player group on the left "bench" was shot in the studio at the correct camera angle and distance. The players were actually sitting on a platform with their legs dangling while leaning against a fixed bar.

It's also worth noting the new KRNA logo! This continues to be one of my favorite radio station logos, with a tagline I am also proud of: 94.1 IOWANAROCK.

07/18/2022

My son Sam will be a sophomore at the University of Iowa. He recently found a stash of rolled posters in the Basler Design print archive. He was intrigued enough with what he found to ask if he could have some of the (now vintage) KRNA, Iowa Basketball posters for his bare-walled living space. I said, "Of course, pick out the one's you want." He did not pick this one.
By now you are onto the formula behind these. 1. Pick a current trend—today we call it viral. 2. Add a really cheesy wordplay headline such as "Hawkarena" (Hey, we're not proud). And 3. Call in the players and dance team to spoof the video (as seen on M TV). This poster was also shot by my comrade John C. Thomas—this time with zero Photoshop trickery.
I present to you, Hawkarena, circa 1996-97. https://music.apple.com/us/music-video/macarena-bayside-boys-remix/1516523066

06/21/2022

As with the previous "Board Games" post, let's time travel back to 1995. The internet had been around for a few years, but only to the few who worked at universities, research institutions, and so on. By 1995 the World Wide Web was extending beyond colleges and universities—but slowly! Your internet connection would have been 14.4 or 28.8 kbs. Your desktop computer screen size would have been 640 x 480 pixels. Browser choices were also limited with Netscape Navigator being the first mainstream browser.

The Iowa Men's basketball poster for 1995-96 jumped on the interNET bandwagon. The poster featured an image of the players captured inside a Macintosh PowerBook 5300—my very first laptop. The image is was presented within a Netscape Navigator web browser framework, complete with crude bitmap graphics.

All of these posters utilized the talent of photographer John C. Thomas.

As a side story, for all of you interested in graphic design tech history, the very first client website that Basler Design Group built was for the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in 1998—a few years after this basketball poster. You can see the website on Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/19981203115002/http://www.crma.org/. The site was designed and coded in html by Drew Davies, using Microsoft FrontPage 1.0. There was no such thing as css, javascript, etc. The site was optimized for a 640 x 480 screen using a "web-safe" 256 color palette. All graphics were dithered gifs. Those were the days.

05/23/2022

This one goes back a ways. This poster was completed in 1994 as Basler Design was entering our 4th year.

The individual images for this poster were shot by John C. Thomas on 4 x5 and 2.25 transparency film. The images were then scanned on our in-house drum scanner and assembled in Photoshop 3.0.

This was a really interesting time in Photoshop history as versions prior did not support layers. All things said, this image probably contained about 50 layers. This single advance in software was mind-boggling.

Each player on the court was an individual photo. The "bench" group was a composite of a couple of groups of players. John had shot the bench players sitting on an actual board with cement blocks so that it was relatively easy to isolate them and superimpose them onto the money stacks.

The base layer to all of this was a photo of the actual basketball floor in Carver Hawyeye Arena (location) which was merged with the graphics from an actual Monopoly board (studio). This process took a good amount of skill as John needed to document camera height, lens selection, focal length and position relative to the object being shot. The short story here is that the Monopoly board studio image had to accurately line up with the perspective of the floor. If not, the software was not yet advance enough to fix it. We would have looked foolish.

The edge of the basketball floor was retouched to look as through it was a paper wrapped edge, with the money stacks then tucked under the floor. I worked on a couple of these posters for the Iowa Men's Basketball program prior to this. If I can find samples of this, I will certainly share. This poster was groundbreaking in its complexity—and a lot of fun trying to achieve things that had never really been done prior.

06/15/2020

Logo for a physicians group of heart surgeons. Logo illustrates the heart, empathy/care, and the hand skills of a surgeon.

06/05/2020

06/05/2020