NBA Best Practices: Golden State Warriors Take Fan Art and Give it to All

It's a truly great thing if a fan takes your brand and applies it to their personal space, right? If they take your brand and put it on their desktop or mobile, Twitter skin, or Facebook profile. It's as if the fan is saying "you are a part of me."

But most of us don't have the time to create our own visuals. And most teams don't have the internal resources to just create collections of creative. What to do?

The Golden State Warriors take us in that direction.

Hit the Golden State home, and you'll note their "FanZone" Menu.

Hovering over reveals "Fan Artwork." Clicking on in will bring you here, to the home/gallery of fan-submitted creative on the squad. A look around will reveal there's both depth and quality in the art -- including the Stephen Curry example below.

As you'll see, each image comes complete with the fan's name and hometown, along with links for downloading two sizes of the wallpaper. You can get the Stephen Curry one shown below for yourself here.

Here's how the Warriors describe the program:

"Creating artwork that depicts current or former Warriors players, coaches, the Warrior Girls and anything else Warriors-related is all encouraged. Just size your creation to 1280x800 AND/OR 1024x768 pixels and if we like what you submit, we'll post it on our Web site."

But, wait, I don't have pictures to use of the squad? Never fear, the Warriors make images and logos available for all to use, here.

So it's ok to use their logos and images and you might get exposure? Pretty cool stuff. A win for the team, and a win for all fans.

How could this be better? Why limit this to desktop wallpaper? Why not make it Twitter skins, Facebook profiles, and mobile wallpapers? And, of course, consider giving a link to the fans who provide the art. That way you could raise the level of designer interested in creating for you. Or, even better, what if the best designer won a job as official artist of the squad for the year? That'd be crazy.

Come back tomorrow as we check out another best practice from the NBA. And as always, you can follow me on Twitter (I'm @pawlow34) or on Facebook (Digital Hoops Blast).

Thanks!

Andy