In the summer of 2008, I was working a corporate gig focused on data insights, a job that I surprisingly really enjoyed. Part of that had to do with my developing love of data and how data can tell meaningful stories. Another part of that had to do with my team, a small but mighty group of talented and smart people with a fantastic boss that nurtured our success and kept us as insulated as he could from the declining health of the company’s corporate culture and morale. I became great friends with that team in a way that I never expected.

Then, out of the blue, my former roommate and colleague sent a blast email to his friend network saying, “Hey, there’s a full-time drumline position opening up with the Tulane University Marching Band.” One application, two phone interviews, and one live interview later, I found myself driving across the country to start a new life as a full-time athletic band educator in New Orleans.

As I look back on my career with Tulane Bands first as a percussion instructor and then as an assistant band director, I characterize it as a jagged upward line. I’ve had my struggles, and I’ve been far from perfect, making mistakes both small and large. It’s in my nature to do my best to not shy away from my failures, to focus on them as a means to continually improve and not be complacent in my role, to ensure that I am doing my best to truly serve my students and the community that I feel responsible for.

That said, if I step back and look at what I’ve done more broadly, I recognize that I’ve left a lasting positive legacy with Tulane Bands and I am beyond grateful that I have had the vehicle to do so for over ten years. While it’s true that I’ve been able to personally take advantage of some amazing opportunities as a composer, arranger, performer, and educator at Tulane and in New Orleans (I’ve been paid to be on TV, to travel both nationally and internationally, and I can tell some great stories including one about how one of our color guard members hit Scott Bakula with a flag and one about how one of my students bonked one of the New Kids on the Block on the head with his sousaphone), none of that compares to the knowledge that I’ve touched the lives of some truly amazing human beings that have been a part of Tulane Bands, and that they have touched mine.

The overall trajectory of the organization is still accelerating. Seeds are being planted for its short-term and long-term future that I am very excited about. But as those new chapters start being written, I’ve come to the heartbreaking realization that it is finally time for me to step down as Assistant Director and hand the megaphone to a fresh voice.

I say ‘finally’ because this has been in the works for a few years, a gradual mental shift of “if I were to leave this job” to “when I leave this job”. My initial plan for this shift was to leave at the end of the 2019/20 academic year, but when COVID-19 caused an abrupt end to Tulane’s spring semester and all of the students left campus suddenly without me being able to give a proper goodbye, I was left with a feeling that I couldn’t truly close my Tulane Bands chapter, so I decided to stay on to help spearhead the adjustments needed to run the organization through COVID shutdown and help keep the organization as stable as I could. As we approach the end of this academic year and the beginning of next year poised to bring operations back to relative normal, I feel like I have the means to achieve the closure that I could not have in 2020 and can now leave my position with Tulane Bands properly.

My primary motivation for leaving has depth and nuance but is at its core very simple: if I stay in the job much longer, my emotional and mental health will decline to such a degree that my will to serve the organization will drift below my acceptable professional standard. For years I’ve tried to amplify what I love about the job as motivational fuel to overcome the roadblocks that have contributed to my decline. Primarily this had to do with dedicating myself to the student experience and their success, not only in how I taught or arranged, but also in my connection to them and my advocacy to truly listen and fight for their needs and wants. I have not always hit this mark, I’ve sometimes been way off target, but I’ve had enough success and grown from both my successes and failures that it has driven me to continually push for what I felt was right despite the external roadblocks that I’ve had to push against.

Years of pushing and fighting those roadblocks has taken its emotional toll on me and this has resulted in the unfortunate reality that while what I love about this job is a very long list compared to what I dislike, what I dislike has become so dominant that it has tainted everything that I love about it. That dominant negativity has eroded my overall conviction and what has manifested in its place has been a slow but steady growth of my own self-inflicted roadblocks that has already made the organization suffer in ways that I view as warning signs.

When there is so much about the job to love, and I’m still struggling to be my best self, the message could not be clearer. Tulane Bands deserves me at my best. When I am no longer capable of that, how can I justify staying?

It is so tough to step down. I love teaching the students and getting to know all of their individual personalities. Tulane is a wonderful university to work for, and I respect its overall mission and approach to education and its dedication to its community of students, staff, and employees, particularly when COVID-19 hit. Tulane Athletics under AD Troy Dannen has established a relationship between athletics and bands/spirit that is unlike any I have ever been a part of, a world-class standard for how an athletic program should partner with spirit and the Tulane community at large. I’ve worked with and collaborated with some amazing people who have respected what I have to offer while also teaching me so much, keeping me on my toes, and pushing me in ways I needed to be pushed.

Tulane Bands has also been such a central force to my cultural life and identity. I’ve been recognized by strangers in the city as a director of Tulane Bands. My creative and musical vision has had a national and international audience, and my ability to run and produce events has earned the respect of some high profile people and organizations. I’ve made lifelong friends with so many people, from peers, colleagues, and students both current and former.

As tough and as sad as it is, I know that stepping down is the right decision for both the organization and for me. In one sense I view it as an act of love for Tulane Bands. I know I’ve done a great job and could even continue to do a decent job, but the organization simply deserves better than my present self, an energy that is different and fresher than what I have to offer.

In another sense, and honestly more importantly, i view it as an act of self love. I think about what has led to this gradual but steady decline in my mentality, and it makes me frustrated, exhausted, and resigned. I need a change, a fresh perspective and injection to my career and life path, and while my new trajectory is uncertain and my future could be written a few different ways, now is the right time for me to devote myself to pivot and plant fresh seeds and flourish in ways that are completely my own, whatever ways those might be.

And flourish I will, and there is no doubt I have Tulane Bands to thank for it.

So I end this long chapter of my life with mixed feelings. I’m beyond excited to explore my new trajectory, to move forward with a new sense of purpose and focus. I mourn the loss of a job and a life that has defined a majority of my professional career that I am proud of and has given me so much, but I take comfort in knowing that stepping down is not the same thing as walking away or saying goodbye. Tulane Bands and I will always be a part of each other in some form. I hope that it looks back at my time with it with as much fondness and love that I look back towards it.

The Original Logo

The very first Tulane University Marching Band logo was developed prior to my hiring in 2008. This functioned pretty well within the brand philosophy of Tulane University and our association with it at the time – the TU shield is very strong and is also prominently displayed on the front of our marching band uniform. The fleur-de-lis that separated the top and bottom half of the words established New Orleans as its flavor.

That said, even when I was first hired I felt like the logo didn’t stand out as a TUMB brand. I also didn’t like that the full text was in a circular logo that did not scale well – as a social media thumbnail, the text on say, a mobile phone, could be so small that you had to strain if you wanted to read it, and the TU shield was so dominant that it made our thumbnail virtually indistinguishable from the broader Tulane University thumbnail.

So after a couple of years in the program, I started asking myself, “How would I change this?”

The 2013(ish) brand shift

While changing the brand was in my head early on, it wasn’t until the 2012-2013 school year that I started to actually experiment and open up Creative Cloud with a fresh vision for the brand. As I started development, a few conceptual components coalesced as its foundation.

1. Stylizing the TUMB

The TUMB acronym was well-established both internally and with the community, so I wanted that to dominate the brand presence more than the fully spelled out “Tulane University Marching Band”. I also wanted to move away from using a circular shape for the full brand logo – while circular was good for social media thumbnails, it wasn’t great for banners or headers. I imagined that the visual icon/element that I was building into this could eventually stand on its own once it was well enough established with the brand text.

When conceptualizing how I would style the text, I wanted to establish a stronger link to Tulane Athletics. At the time, their primary brand revolved around a stylized slanted T, something that we had incorporated into our pregame drill sets – we made a “straight T” that linked to the Tulane University T and then moved to the “slanted T” that mimicked the Athletics T as the end of our performance of the Tulane Fight Song.

So I decided to use that slanted T as the basis for the TUMB text design. While there were certain aspects of that slanted T that were a direct mimic – the slant angle, the double-color border – I made a few deliberate differences to make it feel like an homage rather than a straight copy:

1. Although the official TU logo and the Athletics T used serifs, I decided to go non-serif. This was because the TUMB’s pregame drill set lacked serifs for ease of readability based on the number of members we had at the time, so I wanted our text to reflect that. I also felt that the serif was too formal for the overall image of the TUMB I was trying to project.
2. Color choices. The Tulane Green was considered by my boss to be an important part of our brand identity, so I decided to lean in on that and make the fill of the text green. The border of light/Newcomb blue and off white were a part of Tulane’s official brand colors at the time (while pure white was not), which I thought worked well – the muted white accentuated the Tulane green better than pure white.

(As an aside, a very subtle thing I did with the final version was shift the “UMB” two pixels to the left from the default spacing from the T, necessitating creating two separate text blocks for the “T” and the “UMB”. I felt like the default spacing made the negative space between the T and the U too far apart in comparison to the space between the other letters.)

2. The Visual Image/Images(?)

The other primary conceptual element revolved around answering the question, “How do I create an image/symbol that people can immediately associate with the TUMB?”

A single color silhouette of a marching band member in uniform was one of the first things that popped into my head, but unlike what ended up happening, my original concept was not to associate the brand with the trumpet player as the sole silhouette. Instead, I wanted a more advanced concept of brand identity – to allow the silhouette itself to be flexible and changeable every one or two years, unifying it as the TUMB brand more by having it always include four elements:

1. The official Tulane dark blue as the silhouette color
2. The silhouette always being clearly a TUMB member playing an instrument, dancing with poms, or spinning a flag
3. Always having the TU shield be present in the silhouette
4. Always have the silhouette be placed in the same spot relative to the TUMB text

I pitched this to the staff at the time, taking prominent action shots of various TUMB instrumentalists and turning them into silhouettes – a trumpet player, a bass drummer, a flute player, a color guard member. My boss in particular was highly resistant to the introduction of this new brand in the first place and was even more unconvinced about the silhouette being ‘flexible’, so in an effort to compromise and to try to push the brand forward at all, I said, “let’s table that piece of it – for the time being, we can use the trumpet figure and we can revisit whether we use other images to replace it in a couple of years.” Eventually, my boss reluctantly agreed to move forward and so the new brand was established and launched. In the first two years of its implementation, I tried a few times to revisit the idea of swapping out the silhouette for a different one over time, but I eventually gave that up when it became clear that I wasn’t going to win that fight.

Despite losing that part of the battle and despite the shift being a little shaky to start and more gradual than I would have liked, the new brand eventually became an invested part of the TUMB identity for the staff, its members, and its community, and a strong and dominant brand force that I had intended it to be from the very beginning.

Naturally, once it reached that point, I was already thinking about a change.

Rebranding for the TUMB Centennial

Sometime in 2018/19, I was itching to redo the brand logo that I had created, and decided that using the band’s centennial in 2020/21 would be a good vehicle for that change.

Part of the desire for the rebranding came from external factors:

• Tulane Athletics shifted their brand away from the slanted-T to its current Riptide logo.
• Brands at the more professional level were shifting to be softer, particularly when it came to text fonts and styles.
• Tulane University reinvented its brand philosophy to include more modern color schemes and nuanced brand concepts, particularly around the TU shield and what they called the “TU shield abstractions“, a flexible use of the TU shield outline that could be customized for varying purposes. I gained access to those assets, as well as Tulane’s official fonts (whereas the font i used for the old TUMB logo’s text was something that was bundled with Adobe PS/Illustrator’s default font set, a font I chose because I felt it was the closest mimic of the Tulane Athletics T in style).
• The Tulane Bands staff wanted to shift away from considering the “TUMB” as the overarching brand for the entirety of our organization. since the brand didn’t quite fit as the parent for the Concert Band, Soundwave, or other parts of us that weren’t exactly “marching band” related.

However, more of my desire to change the brand was motivated by my heightened understanding of brand even outside of these external factors. While I’ve always had an instinct for branding concepts, my execution particularly when it comes to logos has been mostly self-taught, and there were things about the visual logo part of the brand that the less-experienced-me from 2012/13 created that the more-experienced me realized were glaring errors.

Some of those errors were easy and subtle to fix – the green glow around the silhouette was at times eliminated entirely, particularly for certain printing processes, use of monochrome versions of the brand, or embroidery that couldn’t translate that glow in a meaningful way. The TU shield was used incorrectly according to Tulane’s brand guidelines (because I put it on a slant and distorted it to mimic how it would be viewed on an actual uniform), so we took that out of some of our designs.

But what became clearest to me over those years was that the trumpet figure itself was both philosophically and practically too complicated.

When i created the original silhouette, I simply took the original trumpet photo, trimmed it to encompass the player only, then applied a solid fill overlay.

Practically, the plume in particular with all of its detail was hard to replicate in embroidery situations or when the resolution of the end result was limited. I was already bothered by the fact that we had some versions of the icon that had the glow vs didn’t, had the shield vs didn’t, but the complexity of the physical shape not translating to certain printing situations meant that even the physical look of the icon had variants which always rubbed me the wrong way even if it was only barely perceptible to the human eye.

Introspection about this and more direct observations of brands both successful and unsuccessful over a period of many years led me to better articulate the philosophical understanding of why the brand I created was not as strong as it could have been:

Brand logos are symbols, icons, and successful ones are clean in their symbolism. No successful brand icon is photorealistic.

While the 2012/13 TUMB brand was done pretty much completely on my own, the office dynamic had since shifted to be more collaborative in general, so the staff came together to talk about the new branding in meetings and email exchanges. When we all sat down to initially discuss my rebranding ideas in conjunction with theirs, I advocated strongly that we eliminate the trumpet figure and start completely from scratch. I wanted to create something more abstract that could encapsulate our program, leverage clearer shapes and lines that could be synergized with the Tulane color palette. This was met with strong resistance – my boss in particular had grown to love the icon and associated it very closely with the TUMB brand (which in one sense was incredibly gratifying), and Andrew, the other Assistant Director was leaning in that direction as well.

After a few back and forths about it, I decided to try to find a middle ground. “If we’re going to keep the trumpet figure,” I said, “let me at least try to clean it up and fix what’s broken about it.”

So I fired up Illustrator and did just that.

Phase 1: Everything but the plume

The first iteration of this was to ignore the plume issue because I wasn’t sure how to tackle it yet and simply take the bumps and creases around the bottom half of the body and in the negative space between the two arms and smooth them out whilst keeping the same overall shape. I also opted to simplify the trumpet and take out the valve pipe detail.

While that last decision was subject to debate, even smoothing out the bottom half got positive response from the rest of the staff who now had a clearer idea of what I was trying to accomplish. From there, I went full speed ahead and started fine-tuning the curves, balancing the left and right sides, and a myriad of other micro-changes to how all of those vector curves were built while simultaneously exploring bigger picture modifications with the plume detail. This turned into a series of back and forth stages where I would mock up three or four different revisions of the current design, send them to the rest of the staff (which now included our newly hired Program Coordinator) for feedback, discuss the changes, and then mock up new versions based on the feedback.

The process ended up being incredibly fun and engaging as a group playground/project, one of the more enjoyable full-staff collaborations I’ve had with this job. I played around with a few different elements:

• protruding hat brim – in the original image, the brim of the hat was present as a three-dimensional protrusion. I wanted to switch the approach of the image to be more like a symbolic straight profile, so I modified the shape of the hat brim to reflect that. It went through several different iterations/shapes – between curves vs rectangles vs triangles. At one point, Andrew suggested taking the brim out altogether. When I tried that, i didn’t initially like it because I felt like the loss of that detail and separation between head and hat was important.
• trace hat brim – one way that I tried to compensate for this was to create a break in the head and hat with a trace line. I had originally thought about this as being white before changing my mind to conceive of it as transparent. This was met with mixed reactions – including my own. I didn’t open up that rabbit hole necessarily because I felt like it was right, but I wanted to put it out there as something radical that could still help retain the separation I was looking for if we eliminated the brim entirely.
• nose – the other way I tried to compensate for the elimination of the brim was to add a nose protrusion. The protrusion was meant to be subtle, a true ‘edge of nose’ that was not overly noticeable unless you focused on it, but would clearly be missed if it wasn’t there.

As the drafts and processes moved forward, however, I became more and more convinced by Andrew’s suggestion that having a straight line with no nose/brim was simpler and cleaner and that the detail didn’t confuse or muddy up the clarity of what was actually happening. In the end, the straight line with no brim, nose, or trace hat brim ended up being the consensus for all of the staff, a conclusion that I didn’t expect when I first started, but I was ultimately very happy with.

Phase 2: The Plume

At the same time, I was tackling the plume, and I decided to approach it similarly – take out most or all of the detail to make it cleaner. I went as far as making it into a clean oval with no feather detail. While all of us eventually came around to the straight line for the face, that same pure cleanliness for the plume faced stronger and more persistent disagreement. While reducing and simplifying the plume detail was fine, eliminating them entirely eliminated the one organic and unique character that the other staff didn’t want to abandon. While I didn’t completely agree with this, enough of the direction of the image was going my way and my feeling about this was not so strong that I consented. I played around with where that feather detail was located on the plume, sometimes influenced by earlier stages of the brim/nose, before arriving at its final location and overall shape.

The final piece that we discussed and drafted centered around how much division there was between the head/hat and the plume itself. In the original, the head/brim/plume all bled into each other particularly as a three-dimensional profile, and with the new cleaner look and with the loss of the brim, my boss made a suggestion to sharpen and indent a curve that more clearly separated the hat and the plume. I drafted a few versions of this separation, some very extreme, which I liked, but Andrew really didn’t like. In the end, I landed in the middle, giving the curve some definition and separation, but not so much as to make it completely independent from the top of the hat.

Finalizing the brand logo with other brand elements

The final brand took that trumpet figure and wrapped it around the Tulane shield abstract and stylized text – a design that was lifted directly from our custom “100th anniversary” logo we developed the previous year. I knew that I wanted to include Tulane’s new shield abstraction assets as a part of the design, and it was also a no brainer to use “Tulane Bands” as the text to fully embrace the change in our program’s conception to make the “TUMB” an entity within the parent organization of Tulane Bands.

Accompanying this was an alternative “header” that could be used to label sub-ensembles or emphasize certain highlights in print or online. We had talked about unifying this header to be the primary driving force for all of our sub-ensembles, but we eventually steered away from that concept because we wanted some of the sub ensembles to be able to retain their own sense of identity despite being a part of the arching Tulane Bands umbrella, not unlike, for example, Kellogg’s cereal. The Kellogg’s K is printed somewhere on all of their cereal boxes, but the sub-brands of the cereals themselves are all unique and don’t necessarily have direct ties to the K’s brand design. In this new context, Tulane Bands is the Kellogg’s where Soundwave, the Green Wave Brass Band, Shockwave, KKY, the Color Guard, and now the TUMB is the Frosted Flakes/Frosted Mini-Wheats/Cracklin’ Oat Bran/Honey Smacks. They all deserve their own independence under the Tulane Bands primary brand.

Final Thoughts

There’s still work to be done with the branding – I want to redo the Green Wave Brass Band logo from its current design as it suffers from some lack-of-cleanliness issues that plagued the original trumpet figure (since I designed it around the same time). I also am starting to think more about how we approach the potential reintroduction of a TUMB logo – something that doesn’t feel right at the moment because I think that would hinder the pace and understanding of our rebrand since the trumpet figure migrated from the TUMB brand to the Tulane Bands brand.

That said, I’m pretty proud of the work that I’ve done to create and harness the brand of this organization – not just this change, but even the older brand change and the band’s conception of our brand identity over the years. I’ve made my mistakes, and I still have a lot to learn, but I also trust in my intuition and my introspection when it comes to brand establishment at this sort of scale, something that I’ve tried to do not just with my job with Tulane Bands but also with nienteForte and myself. I have no doubt that over time as brand concepts and my comprehension of them continue to evolve, I’ll want to shake things up and reinvent my branding somewhere again, although I imagine that it will come not from my work with the Tulane Bands brand over some of my other projects in the immediate future. My own personal brand logo hasn’t changed now in almost a decade and a half and while a part of me is still in love with it, another part of me is ready to take a step back and blow it all up.

This article was lightly edited after initial posting.