Photos by Laura Barisonzi

Visual Arts

The Art of Sports

As a creative director for the NFL, Alex Mount has a hand in designing logos, decor, and gear for the Super Bowl and other league initiatives

Beyond that, Mount oversees quality control and trademark compliance for the NFL. Every single shirt, hat, pin, banner, poster, foam finger, jersey, lanyard, sock, mug, car decal, pencil—every pair of sandals and sunglasses and underwear (yes, even that)—is carefully inspected by Mount and her colleagues to ensure the colors are correct, the proportions are accurate, and that everything is as it should be.

“My boss said to me at one point, ‘I always said that when this gets boring, maybe I’ll look for something else,’” she recalls. “Well, I’ve been here almost 11 years, and he’s been here even longer. It’s never been boring. There’s always somebody pushing us to be more creative, and that’s what makes it really cool.”

READING THE PLAY

In some ways, Mount’s career started on the field, albeit a different one. A graphic design major and a BU lacrosse defensive player, Mount often headed to class in athletic wear and to practice in paint-splattered gear. As graduation loomed, she fretted about her future. She loved sports—and loved art. And yet, society has long pitted the two as polar opposites (consider the wildly different characters in The Breakfast Club and their inability, at first, to find common ground with one another).

“I found myself getting lost, thinking, what is this next step going to be? How do I find a career? What am I going to do? When, really, it was right there in front of me,” Mount says. “The whole reason that I went to BU was because I could do these two things that I loved. So why not make that into a career? And once I realized that, it was full steam ahead.”

During her senior year, Mount got an internship at SME Sports Branding, a New York–based sports branding agency. Every day over winter break, she commuted into the city from her home on Long Island and spent her days “doing the basics,” she says. She searched for specific fonts, made sketches, and came up with monogram design ideas for the Knicks City Dancers, the organization’s official dance team.

It wasn’t glamorous work by any stretch of the imagination. “But I just loved it,” Mount says. “I knew I had found what I wanted to do.”

In designing the logo for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, Mount’s team made use of colors like “Crawfish Red” and “Humid Teal.”

GOING LONG

The following summer, after graduation, SME Sports Branding hired Mount as a junior graphic designer. It was 2007, and the entire city, it seemed, was talking about Yankee Stadium. Construction on a state-of-the-art facility in the Bronx had begun a year before, while “the house that Ruth built” was set to be demolished. It was an exciting time to be in the sports business.

“All the brochures, all the pamphlets to ticket-holders, the websites—all the information about the amenities and the facility—it was a great environment to be in,” Mount says.

She had other projects at the time too. Mount designed the athletic mascot for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.: Scotty, a Scottish terrier sporting a smart plaid scarf, which is in use today.

Then, during the 2008 financial crisis, Mount was laid off, along with all the junior staff at her agency and agencies around the country. She found work at a new public relations agency and spent the next couple of years honing her skills, teaching herself as much as she could, and staying on top of the latest trends. She also had her eye on her next move: Madison Square Garden.

In 2010, an opportunity at the Garden opened up: art director for the Knicks and the Rangers. Mount was ready. And she got it.

In some ways, the role was familiar. Much like Yankee Stadium before, Madison Square Garden was undergoing a major renovation, so Mount helped with the communications about all the upcoming changes. There were some familiar faces too. One of the Rangers players, Matt Gilroy (MET’16), overlapped with Mount at BU. His fiancée at the time, Jenny (Taft) Gilroy (CGS’08, COM’10) played lacrosse with Mount.

In other ways, it was completely unique. The summer Mount started working for Madison Square Garden, rumors flew that LeBron James might join the Knicks. He’d made a big decision to leave Cleveland, and the Knicks were making pointed overtures.

“At one point they thought he was going to come to New York,” she recalls. “So we were Photoshopping him into Knicks uniforms and hoping.” James didn’t join the New York squad, “but it was still such a fun time to be there,” she says.

In January 2014, Mount read a story about Jaime Weston, vice president for brand and creative at the NFL, in the New York Times.

Suddenly, she could see herself in the upper echelons of sports marketing and branding: “I thought, huh, the NFL. That’s interesting.”

By June, she had a new job.

TOUCHDOWN

Now, more than a decade into her NFL career, Mount has traveled to historic Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisc., for a photo shoot with some of the Packers. She’s rented out big, luxurious houses to stage all sorts of in-home apparel and decor spreads. She’s taken over some of the NFL’s signature events, creating branding style guides for NFL Kickoff and the Pro Bowl.

Mount’s first Super Bowl as creative director, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, was a true test of her skills.

“We had to get really creative for that one,” she says dryly. To pull off some sense of normalcy, Mount had to improvise. She met with designers on her team in a commuter lot off the New Jersey Turnpike to look at color swatches for team staff jackets. When travel restrictions made it impossible to get to Raymond James Stadium, in Tampa, Fla., for a photo shoot, Mount and her colleagues had a local photographer take a 360-degree image of the inside of the stadium, had sod from the field shipped up to New York, and staged a photo with the real Vince Lombardi Trophy. You’d never know the difference.

Since then, the events have gone back to normal, but each one is different from the last.

Alex Mount’s NFL designs have appeared everywhere, from the League’s official website to stadiums and apparel.

Mount starts planning for the Super Bowl two years in advance, doing research on the character of each new host city, coming up with the colors and motifs that will tell the right story. The logo for the 2025 championship, in New Orleans, featured colors such as “Crawfish Red” and “Humid Teal.” The logo for Super Bowl LX, to take place in Santa Clara, Calif., in 2026, is a colorful celebration of the vibrant history of the Bay Area.

Mount sees fresh opportunities on the horizon for the NFL. The league’s international footprint is growing, and its domestic games continue to capture some of the biggest audiences in live television. It’s a juggernaut that Mount is sticking with for the foreseeable future.

After all, her job requires attention to the smallest details and the big picture. She must rely on her teammates to carry out the plan and trust them to improvise when things go sideways. It’s notching small victories, absorbing setbacks, and still moving toward the goal.

Sound familiar?