Aim High: Air Force Academy Athletics

Latitude Signage serves the Air Force Academy athletics department with custom branding solutions.

Only a select few have what it takes to be an Air Force Academy cadet. To recruit the best of the best, the Air Force Academy athletics department wanted to overhaul the look of their football and basketball team areas. Nestled in the foothills in Colorado Springs is their sprawling campus, built in the late 1950’s following the modernism movement, the campus is a tourist destination. Gone are the plain cement block walls that once welcomed athletes to meeting room facilities. Now those walls are adorned with large print custom graphics and illuminated Air Force Academy logos.

BIG WIN

The most exciting features in the signage package are the dramatic oversized images. They are digitally printed images that are transferred on to fabric using dye sublimation. With a silicone edge, the fabric easily snaps into a frame, making it a lightweight solution for the wall that’s also easy to update in the future. The images also act as identifiers to distinguish the football and the men’s and women’s basketball areas from one another.

"We’re are always trying to recruit more athletes to come here. So going from stark white walls to pretty graphics definitely helped increase our pride. Rather than walking around barren hallways with pictures from the 1970s, we’re now more in the 21st century," says Major Becky Bucher, Facilities Operations Air Force Academy.

As a football recruiting tool, the new signage tells a story of success for former athletes. There is a wall dedicated to how many All-Americans they’ve had and another wall dedicated to players who’ve gone on to play in the NFL. For the Air Force Academy staff, those stat walls are modular and easy to update in the future.