MINNEAPOLIS — Nicole Meyer has always felt at home on a soccer field. She started playing at age 5.
"I grew up in a bedroom with Mia Hamm posters plastered all over my walls," Meyer said. "I’m fully in it."
To be "fully in it" as a goalie, her hands, feet, and eyes were quick to focus on something quite literally black and white.
Now, decades after she started playing, as the creative director at an ad agency, Meyer's life revolves around a full spectrum of color: most recently, the colors in a beautiful Minnesota Aurora Borealis.
Meyer is one of a three-member all-women creative team that designed the brands for the top three finalists for the names of the new Minnesota USL Women's soccer team. She was joined by co-founder Allie Reinke and designer Carla Zetina-Yglesias.
When the top three picks for a team logo were revealed a few months ago, each designer took ownership of one to see it to the finish line. Meyer took the lead on Aurora, but she says the process was collaborative throughout.
"We started out with mood boards for each, as well as kind of sketches," Meyer said. "We were working nights and weekends, odd hours on this. So we had some Google Docs going, we had text threads, we had Dropbox folders just sharing a lot of ideas early on."
Meyer was drawn to the name because "it feels Minnesotan." She says the light displays started appearing around the same time she started working on the project.
"Right around the time that we were starting to dig into the brand, a lot of people were actually starting to see some up North," Meyer said. "And so we were getting excited, like – look it’s happening!"
Throughout the design process, she was sorting through more than a dozen colors but settled on three colors they're calling Aurora teal, midnight blue, and flash red.
Starting the day of the reveal on Sunday, the team hosted a handful of pop-up shops that spanned four days. On that same day they ran out of all merchandise.
Meyer says she's thrilled with how things played out.
"Overall it’s just been amazing to see the community support for the brand, not only throughout the process, but when the brand launched last week," she said. "Just the enormously positive reaction throughout the internet is something that’s really cool to see."
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