Tag: Clemson University

By Griffin Barfield

Most sports fans own at least one t-shirt donning the brand of their favorite team or jersey representing their favorite athlete. When they are preparing to join the crowd at a field, rink or stadium, sports fans expect their regalia to look on-brand.

According to Drs. Erica Walker and Amanda Bridges, Clemson faculty in the Department of Graphic Communications, “Branded athletic apparel is a multi-billion dollar business expanding year over year. Sports teams and their fans expect brand accuracy and durability across all types of textile-based products from clothing to home decor. Color is a vital part of a brand’s identity and printing consistent, durable and accurate brand colors across different materials can be challenging for manufacturers.”

The pair have examined the accuracy and durability of two Clemson brand colors, Clemson Orange and Regalia (purple), “specified by the brand as Pantone and CMYK values and measured as LAB values using a spectrophotometer, and printed on three textiles commonly used for clothing.”

Late in 2024, Walker and Bridges received international recognition for their research presented at conferences in Montreal, Canada (Color and Imaging Conference, October 2024) and Seville, Spain (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, November 2024). Additionally, they will present in Boulder, Colorado this March at the Technical Association of Graphic Arts (TAGA) conference. 

Walker shared some of the challenges their research aimed to address.

“Orange is an especially difficult color to match in any medium,” she said. “Our eyes are pretty sensitive to variations in this color range so branded content creators have to be especially vigilant to ensure a consistent visual match. 

Another challenge is the variety of materials and places that the color appears. We see Clemson Orange on the TV screen, on printed t-shirts, painted on the grass on the athletic fields, on the plastic seat backs, on metal decorative art outside, and so many other surfaces. Each backing material and process must be carefully chosen and controlled to ensure accurate brand color.”

During their investigation, the two provided opportunities for freshmen-level experiential learning with a direct-to-garment (DTG) printer and worked closely with Clemson Athletics to assess how the University’s brand colors are affected by commercial washing processes, looking at color degradation. 

Walker shared advice for printers and manufacturers to achieve color accuracy and durability. 

“You can never have too much quality control throughout the process. Everyone who touches the artwork or product from the beginning design to manufacturing to the sales floor has a role in ensuring brand accurate colors,” she said. “This even includes fans! How we launder brand-color products can help the colors stay accurate for longer. 

There are definitely some combinations of textiles and processes that will provide more accurate colors both initially and after multiple washes, so manufacturers take that into consideration when developing new products and deciding how to manufacture them.”

At the end of the day, one question remains above all in Walker’s and Bridges’ research: How can the University engage with textile manufacturers, printers and launderers to ensure the brand stays true on apparel and other products? 

Walker has been a faculty fellow at the Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute for many years. The proposals she submitted for ‘director’s funding’ were reviewed and approved by RHBSSI leadership, and the Institute was pleased to fund the purchase of the DTG printer and offer financial assistance to participate in the conferences. 

“It was a very [special] international conference and the first time either of us had attended it,” Walker said about CIC. “[It] would definitely be a valuable event to visit again and we really appreciate the support which allowed us to go to both CIC and TAGA this academic year.”

Rikishi Smith-Rey, faculty fellow of the Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute and assistant professor in Clemson University’s Department of Communication, recently founded Sport PhD, a service that seeks to make academic research centered around sports more accessible for athletes.

Smith-Rey is a former Division I athlete and youth soccer coach with extensive research experience in the sports communication and health communication fields. During her coaching years, she was able to apply her academic research to her youth athletes in a very tangible way.

“To me, translational research is so important,” Smith-Rey said. “If our research is just sitting in journals, it’s not helping those that we mean it for. I get a lot of worth out of seeing my research help.”

Smith-Rey was inspired by a former athlete she coached to form Sport PhD, saying, “I still have not seen something that breaks down the knowledge that’s out there for athletes.”

Despite the extensive research on sports, Smith-Rey feels that this research is not accessible enough to athletes, especially those at the youth level. Areas of sport such as recruiting, sleep, nutrition, psychology and mental health are all topics that Smith-Rey seeks to promote to athletes in an accessible way.

Smith-Rey’s founding of Sport PhD was inspired in part by conversations with Brandon Boatwright, Ph.D., another assistant professor in the communication department at Clemson. Clemson women’s soccer student-athlete Ally Lynch has also worked as an intern with Rey this semester, and the pair have done extensive work on starting Sport PhD from the ground up.

Smith-Rey is excited to continue the work of Sport PhD as she works to widen the reach of the company.  

“Sports gave me everything,” Smith-Rey added. “If I can give a little bit back to athletes so that they can understand their sport a little better, that would be super meaningful to me.”

 Those interested in following the development of Sport PhD can find them on LinkedIn and Instagram.  

With March marking Women’s History Month, the Clemson Athletics and sports science communities have plenty to celebrate, including several women’s varsity programs at the University, one of which is the rowing team.

Competing in its first-ever season in 1999, the Clemson women’s rowing team has an enriched history and has been a staple of Clemson Athletics for two-and-a-half decades.

After Clemson announced it was adding a varsity women’s program in 1997, two years later, the Tigers were on Lake Hartwell practicing and competing. Since then, the team has accomplished great feats and has even climbed all the way to the mountain top in NCAA competition. 

One decade after being established as a program, Clemson’s Varsity 4+ team captured Clemson’s first-ever national championship at the NCAA Rowing Championships in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in 2009.

That championship helped pave the way for future rowing athletes to attend and compete at Clemson University, two of whom are set to speak at the Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute’s (RHBSSI) annual lecture series later this month.

An attempt at a world record

In honor of Women’s History Month, RHBSSI is proud to be hosting Jenny D’Anthony and Anna McLean on March 26 in Freeman Hall for its annual lecture series.

The duo will speak about their ongoing preparation for the estimated 60-day trip from Monterey Bay, Calif., to Kauai, Hawaii, as a part of the World’s Toughest Row competition. From taking two-hour sleeping shifts to burning 10,000 calories a day to desalinating ocean water, D’Anthony and McLean will begin their journey across the Pacific on June 8.

For months, the pair has been training to be the youngest and fastest female athletes to row across the Pacific Ocean. As a part of their mission, D’Anthony and McLean are raising money for the Hear Her Roar campaign, which brings awareness and financial support to Clemson’s female student-athletes.

McLean and D’Anthony were members of Clemson’s rowing team beginning in 2014 until they graduated from Clemson in 2017 and 2018, respectively. In 2022, McLean, from the United Kingdom, and D’Anthony, from the United States, formed United Row.

D’Anthony credits her time at Clemson for the person she is today and her motivation to complete the upcoming row across the Pacific. 

“My Clemson experience was nothing short of incredible,” D’Anthony told Iptay. “It transformed me in ways well beyond athletics. Opening my eyes and mind to things I never thought possible. I wear the paw with pride and am grateful for the opportunity to represent and give back to my alma-mater. I am incredibly excited to immerse myself in an all-consuming challenge, where I will test my limits both physically and mentally. There are few, if any, times in life you can entirely devote your attention to one goal. This is one incredible exception.”

As for McLean, her experience as a Tiger already inspired her to row the Atlantic Ocean with her brother in 43 days, 15 hours and 22 minutes in 2019. Now, she’s onto an even bigger challenge with her best friend. 

“As a student-athlete at Clemson I was able to meld my love for rowing alongside my passion for business,” McLean told Iptay. “Surrounded by such driven and highly successful students empowered me to ‘never settle’ (but) rather continue striving for more. From mornings on Lake Hartwell to months in the Atlantic Ocean, and now with dreams even bigger, conquering the Pacific, I am beyond grateful for the foundation Clemson laid and humbled to be giving back to my alma mater and supporting future generations to pursue their dreams too.”

Clemson students, faculty, alumni and community members are invited to hear D’Anthony and McLean discuss their upcoming 2,800 nautical-mile rowing competition. The talk with RHBSSI will begin at 6 p.m. EST on March 26 in the Freeman Hall auditorium, followed by a reception with food and refreshments in the Freeman Hall gallery from 7-8 p.m.

Those interested should RSVP for the event at clemsonsportslecture.rsvpify.com.

Two Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute faculty fellows were recently featured on Clemson University Research Foundation’s (CURF’s) social media accounts for their valuable research and work in the Clemson Headgear Impact Performance (CHIP) Laboratory.

John DesJardins, a bioengineering professor, and Greg Batt, a food, nutrition, and packaging sciences associate professor, have worked in the CHIP lab for several years, aiming to assess the faceguards on headgear in sports and improve their effectiveness and safety.

Under Batt and DesJardins’ leadership, the CHIP lab offers unique opportunities for students interested in researching the effects of impacts on the head and neck in sports. Last year, the institute spotlighted the work of Bianca Henline, a then-senior bioengineering student who researched the effectiveness of commonly worn bull riding helmets. 

The institute is proud to financially support much of the work performed in the CHIP lab as DesJardins and Batt continue to lead a team of innovative students and groundbreaking research.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving in 2018, my family and I settle into our living room to watch the Clemson Tigers play the Duke Blue Devils. I was lucky to be able to fly home a little before the break began and was thrilled to be able to watch the football game with my family. My mom prepared for the occasion, filling the coffee table with snacks usually reserved for our Super Bowl watch party. As the camera pans to the Tigers making their run down the Hill as part of the most exciting 25 seconds in college football, my brother only makes one comment: “Oh, Duke is running down the Hill!”

Of course, it wasn’t Duke. There is no way an opponent would run down the Hill at a Clemson home game. But lo and behold, it appeared that way. Clemson’s purple jerseys donned to celebrate Clemson’s “Purple Out” football game in honor of its Military Appreciation Day, appeared navy blue on the screen, a similar shade to Duke’s team colors. And it wasn’t just our TV; Clemson looked to be wearing navy blue across broadcast footage and television screens. My dad and brother had a field day, cracking jokes about how Duke was playing themselves in Death Valley.

This is not a problem limited to Clemson. This brand color discrepancy is also apparent with other teams when they play, such as the Dallas Cowboys, where their silver pants appeared green during a broadcasted game. And what is a sports team without their team colors? Unfortunately, trying to correct the brand colors means all the colors in the frame would suffer. Environmental lighting and post-production color adjustments affect the entire frame of the broadcast feed. So, while the brand color could be adjusted to appear correct, the rest of the frame would be adjusted as well, ruining other colors at the expense of fixing one.

Enter Dr. Erica Walker, a Graphic Communications professor at Clemson University, who brought together a team that asked whether the frame could be adjusted so these colors appear to brand specification, but not at the cost of the rest of the frame being adjusted as well. She partnered with the Watson in the Watt Creative Inquiry run by Dr. Hudson Smith and Dr. Carl Ehrett to work with undergraduate students to develop an AI-based solution. I ended up being one of those undergraduate students. I was thrilled to get involved with research about AI but was even more excited by this problem we would be solving, remembering that this was something my own family had commented on weeks before.

Once a week, as the ColorNet research team settles into their meeting room in the Watt Family Innovation Center and exchanges what their week looks like, Dr. Walker comes into the team room with a big smile on her face. “Hey y’all, how’s it going?” she says as she sets down her bag. It always starts the weekly meetings on a good note and the team can’t help but be excited about what they will accomplish that day.

And accomplish great things we did. With the efforts of Dr. Walker, ColorNet was developed, a patent-pending artificial intelligence (AI) technology that takes a live video feed and adjusts it frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel, in real-time to ensure brand color accuracy. This convolutional neural network, a type of machine learning model, was trained on numerous clips from Clemson’s football games that were manually color corrected using Adobe Premiere Pro. ColorNet learns what areas of the frame are considered brand colors and how to shift those pixels so that they appear to visually match Clemson’s brand colors without losing the distinctions between highlights and shadows and without changing the non-brand color areas.

After training the model to color correct Clemson’s orange, Pantone 165, it was time to test it. All testing took place in Littlejohn Coliseum, allowing the technology to be tested on a standard jumbotron and within the current infrastructure of a live event. The alpha test involved streaming one of Clemson’s home football games into Littlejohn and onto the jumbotron to determine if ColorNet would catch the various spots of Clemson orange in each frame and adjust these areas to be the recognizable color fans know and love. With some adjustments to the program and support provided via pizza from Dr. Walker, the alpha test proved to be a success.

The beta test took place during a live women’s basketball game, where we ran ColorNet on the jumbotron feed during the basketball game in front of a live audience of fans. The goal was to determine if ColorNet was truly targeting areas of brand color and was able to be extended to other sports or broadcast arenas. The technology proved itself once again! It correctly picked out the women’s jerseys and the splashes of Clemson orange found on the spectators in the arena. I remember walking the arena with Dr. Walker, both of us looking up at the jumbotron in wonder at what we had accomplished with ColorNet.

Our work is by no means over. The goal is to make it where we can color correct any team’s colors, not just Clemson’s. While we were able to expand ColorNet’s capabilities so it can also color correct Clemson purple along with orange, the goal is to generalize the application of the model so that it can color correct to a given color based on user input. Are we playing Alabama? Let’s correct for Crimson Tide red as well. LSU? Let’s adjust for their purple and gold. While COVID-19 makes it hard to meet and collaborate in person towards this development, the meetings are still opened the same. And the same excitement for where ColorNet will go next is tangible even through the screen, thanks to the passion of Dr. Walker.