The #34 at Coronado
Mattermost sponsored Layne Riggs and the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford F-150 at the first NASCAR race held on an active military base. I worked on it from the first merch files to the video after the win, and covered the race weekend on my own with a phone.
- Event
- NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series, NASCAR San Diego Weekend, Coronado Street Course
- Partner
- Front Row Motorsports, driver Layne Riggs
- Result
- Riggs won the race
- My part
- Merch design and print files. Branding direction for the livery. Firesuit sign-off. Content plan and pre-race posts with Mattermost’s social team. Solo event coverage. Rapid-response video.
- Gear
- One phone, shooting RAW
- Tools
- IllustratorPhotoshopPremiere Pro
It started with stickers
Mattermost’s CMO told me about the sponsorship in my first week. It was already in motion. My first job was merch. Stickers came first, then hats and shirts. I had spent more than a year managing print and digital ad assets for a national retailer, so I knew what a print vendor needs from a file. I checked each vendor’s specs for color accuracy and built the files to match.
White and yellow became blue
Once the merch was approved, I was connected with Front Row Motorsports’ media team. Their first concept for the truck was white and yellow, and it didn’t look like Mattermost to me. I pushed the branding to a bright blue that would stand out on track, kept the yellow, and added the topographic lines Mattermost uses across its brand. Front Row took that direction and produced the final truck, so the livery is a collaboration. They also had me sign off on the firesuit.
Everything around the race
I wrote a plan for what we would post each day and worked with Mattermost’s social team on a run of posts leading into the weekend: fun facts, and why Mattermost was there at all.
Then I covered the weekend alone. There was no media pass, and base security limited what equipment could come in, so I tested phone settings before the trip, shot everything in RAW and color corrected later. NASCAR owns the rights to footage of the race itself. Everything I published had to be shot around it: the pit, the crew, the base, the aircraft, the signs.
Riggs was the favorite to win, so I had rapid-response posts ready for a win and different messaging ready for a loss. It was also Father’s Day weekend, and Layne’s father Scott Riggs raced in the Cup Series, so we had that thread ready too.
The Pit Crew Principle
At the track I kept watching the pit crew. The people who use Mattermost are often behind the scenes too. We’re not making products that go boom, and we’re not the flashiest thing, but we enable the mission. The pit crew enables the mission. They make the car go.
That became a short video and the blog post “The Pit Crew Principle.” The video opens on the side everyone sees, with Front Row Motorsports’ polished photos of the truck and driver, then cuts to my phone footage of the crew getting everything ready. The drop in polish is on purpose. I cut it in about a day. A winner’s reel took a few hours, and most of that was upload time.
The pit crew enables the mission. They make the car go.
My takeaway is that we planned to improvise. I had a loose structure going in, and the constraints, from the phone to the rights rules, shaped most of the creative decisions.
Gallery
The work in its own colors · tap to enlargeIn the order of the story: the merch, the base, the pit. Photos by me, on a phone. Sticker concept by me.