How a Bachelor of Fine Arts Graduate Created the Legendary Leaping Tiger Mark
It was the early eighties. Rock and metal music dominated FM radio. Dana Kirk was head coach of the Memphis Tigers men’s basketball team, and Craig Thompson (BFA ’83) was trying to figure out how he could score free tickets to see the Tigers play at the sold-out Mid-South Coliseum.
At the time, Keith Lee was on the Tigers men’s basketball team. In his four seasons, the Tigers went 104-24 and reached the 1985 Final Four.
“Basketball was huge. The waiting list to get season tickets was about 20,000 people,” Thompson said. “Somebody had to die or bequeath you tickets in order for you to go see a basketball game.”
Thompson spent his youth going to games with his family and even him and his wife’s first date was at a Tigers men’s basketball game. So, for Thompson going to the games was just second nature.
“Our biggest concern once we graduated and got married was how are we going to see the Tigers basketball games?” he said.
“I went to the Athletics office and found out who to talk to and wound up getting a meeting with Bob Winn (longtime Memphis Athletics administrator) and Lee Fowler (then assistant basketball coach). I said to them, ‘Look these things are awful, I’m a graduate from here. Let me do your posters, and you give me tickets.’ They said, ‘deal.’”
A partnership was born, and Thompson went to work. First, he redesigned the basketball posters and then the football ones. “They really liked them, and they became really popular. People started collecting them,” he said.
That laid the foundation for the creation of the famous Leaping Tiger logo Memphians know and love today.
It was around 1993 when Winn told Thompson that the University needed a new athletic logo because its name was changing from Memphis State University to the University of Memphis, which became official in 1994. “They really wanted to evolve the old MSU logo into something a little more modern.”
Thompson started doing sketches and the Leaping Tiger mark with the “M” was born. “That was so far back, I did that ink on the board and then cut an overlay for the color. Everything was done by hand. There were no computers back then.”
It was distributed to the NCAA to get approval. Once approved, it became used widely in athletics.
“The funny part is, I argued for the logo to originally be gray as it is now, and not orange,” Thompson said. He said out of all the thousands of logos he’s done in his 40-year career — none are as recognizable as the Leaping Tiger.
A lifelong Memphian, Thompson was destined for the creative field. “When I was a kid, I got in trouble in school for drawing on my notebooks. Instead of writing letters, I would always be drawing — I have always drawn.”
When he was in high school at Briarcrest Christian School, an art teacher said, “Hey, you know you could do this for a living.”
Thompson said he was sold and began taking graphic design classes his senior year.
Having lived in Memphis his entire life, Thompson set his sights on going to an art school out of state. But the University of Memphis had a really strong graphic design program too, with faculty including Calvin Foster, professor emeritus who served as faculty member for 40 years, and illustrator John Robinette who had an impressive clientele list of national magazines.
Today, Thompson is president and creative director of Disciple Design, a company he founded in 1991. Their goal is to give non-profits the tools they need to accomplish their mission whether it’s a logo, a new website or a video to help tell their story. He is also a talented chalk artist, creating works which have appeared in murals around the city and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The initiative honors the legacy of Liza Wellford Fletcher by building a world-class stadium at the UofM, creating a lasting impact on the community.
“People are so passionate about the logo,” Thompson said. “There’s so much emotional connection to it. It has a lot to do with tradition and the fact that it’s been with us for such a long time, it has so many memories that are tied to it. As a designer, it makes me happy that it’s going to hang around.”
