An expansion team built around a new fieldhouse.

The Indiana Fever arrived with a new building. English Wikipedia says the WNBA announced on 7 June 1999 four locations to receive expansion franchises, Indiana among them, with the Indianapolis team timed to coincide with the opening of Conseco Fieldhouse, the home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, now called Gainbridge Fieldhouse. The team began play in the 2000 WNBA season.

The owners were the Pacers’ owners. Wikipedia lists Herb Simon, the founder of Simon Property Group and owner of the Indiana Pacers, as owner from 2000 to the present, and Melvin Simon as co-owner from 2000 to 2009. Herb Simon has owned the Fever since its founding, and the team is run within Pacers Sports & Entertainment, which, Wikipedia says, named Allison Barber president and chief operating officer of the Fever in March 2019.

The launch leaned on the state’s relationship with the sport. Wikipedia says the Fever’s launch campaign used the slogan “In 49 states it’s just basketball, but this is Indiana”, a line that has become a popular catchphrase about the game’s place in the state.

Kelly Krauskopf, who announced the name as the team’s chief operating officer in 1999, became general manager in 2003, according to Wikipedia, and was later promoted to president of the franchise. Near the end of the 2019 season, Wikipedia says, the Fever announced that home games would move to Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse while the downtown arena, then called Bankers Life Fieldhouse, was renovated, with a planned return to the renamed Gainbridge Fieldhouse once the work was done. The 2020 season itself was played at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A name about a feeling, and the colours of the Pacers.

The name came first. A SportsTicker report published by ESPN.com on 17 December 1999 said Indiana’s WNBA expansion franchise would be known as the Fever, with the announcement made that Friday by Kelly Krauskopf. She said the team had worked with the league office to develop a name that captured the passion for basketball in the state and appealed to fans of all ages, and added the hope that everyone would catch “WNBA fever” in the team’s first summer. The Fever joined the league that year alongside new teams in Miami, Portland and Seattle.

The colours tied the team to its NBA sibling. The same report said the Fever logo would use the traditional Pacer Blue and Pacer Yellow, along with an accent of red as the team’s third colour.

The logo had a single author. Wikipedia says the mark was created in 1999 by the designer Todd Radom, and quotes Radom describing a “decidedly retro vibe” that refers back to the “Hoosiers” era of basketball in Indiana. Radom has published sketches of the logo, according to Wikipedia. Writing in The Hardball Times on 15 May 2006, in a profile of Radom’s career, the site listed the Indiana Fever among the clients for which he had designed logos and brand identities, alongside work for Major League Baseball clubs, a Super Bowl and the Basketball Hall of Fame, and described him as a designer who works alone, without focus groups or a large agency behind him.

The original uniforms carried the palette straight onto the court. Wikipedia says the home jerseys from 2000 to 2006 were white with red, dark blue and yellow on the sides and “Fever” written across the front, while the road jerseys were dark blue with red and yellow on the sides and “Indiana” in red letters trimmed with white on the chest.

Design and documentation.

A women’s professional basketball club builds its identity under a different set of pressures from a men’s club in the same city. Many teams in the league were set up in markets that already had an established men’s franchise, and some began life as sister clubs to an NBA team, sharing an owner, a front office and an arena. That arrangement shapes the brand from the start: the women’s team often borrows a colour, a type style or a naming idea from its partner, then has to decide how far to move away from it as it gains its own owners and its own audience.

Colour is usually the first place that independence shows. A club can stay close to the regional palette of the city’s other teams, or pick a combination that no neighbour uses, so that a jersey reads as its own at a glance on television and in the stands. Names tend to come from weather, landscape, local landmarks or a sense of energy, and short single-word names give designers room to build a mark around one strong shape.

Arenas matter too. Teams that share a building with a men’s club, an ice-hockey team or a concert schedule have to make their court, signage and branding stand out on nights when the venue belongs to them, and teams that move between venues carry their identity from one building to the next.

Uniform updates, sponsors and a yellow jersey.

The uniforms have been revised several times. Wikipedia says that from 2007 the white home jerseys gained blue and yellow trim running from the neck down the side, with “Fever” in red across the front and the player’s name in dark blue below a red number; the dark blue road jerseys took yellow and white trim, with “Indiana” on the front in red with white trim.

In 2011, as part of the league’s move to Adidas’ Revolution 30 uniform technology, the Fever made subtler changes. According to Wikipedia, the home uniforms stayed white, but the “Fever” wordmark was now written in navy with red and yellow trim, and the numbers became rounded and red; the road uniforms kept their look apart from new striping and the rounded numbers.

Sponsors joined the jersey from 2013. Wikipedia says the Fever announced on 19 October 2012 that Finish Line would be their uniform sponsor, beginning with the 2013 season, with the design otherwise unchanged apart from a new number style. In 2016, for the league’s 20th season, every game featured all-colour uniform matchups, and the Fever unveiled a yellow jersey as a light-coloured uniform to go with their standard navy. In 2019, Wikipedia says, Salesforce replaced Finish Line as uniform sponsor, and, as on every WNBA uniform that year, the jersey front carried both Salesforce and AT&T, a new league partner, with the player’s number moved to the back only.

Through those revisions, as Wikipedia describes them, the uniforms kept to navy, yellow and red, the three colours announced for the logo in December 1999.

For a design guide, the Indiana Fever show how a new team can borrow an established palette and still mark its own ground with a third colour. Compare the Indiana Pacers, whose blue and yellow the Fever share, and the league in WNBA. For this guide we use navy, yellow and red with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Indiana Fever’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.