UMSL Chancellor Kristin Sobolik (left) and Executive Director of Athletics Holly Sheilley pose with Louie the Triton, as Louie holds a shirt with the new Louie athletics logo. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

After the Triton Sound pep band kicked off the Pre-Pack the Stands Pep Rally on Thursday afternoon on the Millenium Student Center’s third-floor rotunda, University of Missouri–St. Louis Chancellor Kristin Sobolik welcomed the overflow crowd of students, athletes, faculty and staff members to the special event, part of UMSL’s Homecoming 2025 celebration.

Sobolik hyped up the audience ahead of that night’s men’s and women’s basketball doubleheader against Drury in the final regular-season game for both teams.

But before everyone turned their attention to the games that would be taking place at the Mark Twain Athletic Center, Sobolik brought UMSL Executive Director of Athletics Holly Sheilley to the MSC stage for an announcement.

“Today, I’m proud to unveil the new Louie athletic mascot mark, a first-of-its-kind design that will proudly represent our athletic department and our community,” Sheilley told the crowd. “This mark captures the energy, spirit and competitive drive of all of our Tritons. It’s a visual decoration of our ongoing commitment to excellence.”

The video revealing the Louie logo, which was created by UMSL Senior Designer Martin Baragiola, was met with resounding cheers throughout the rotunda. T-shirts and stickers with the new logo were passed out to the students, and students were encouraged to wear the shirts to support the basketball teams against Drury.

The UMSL Triton Store has apparel with the new logo, and more options are available online.

“We just had the trident – the fork – so we really needed something else,” Sheilley told UMSL Daily after the pep rally. “I think the students are really excited about it. I showed it to the coaches about a week ago, and they said, ‘Can we get it now so we can go ahead and order stuff with the logo?’ They’re excited about it, too.”

The Triton nickname was officially approved for UMSL in 2007, and the Louie mascot was introduced in 2010. The UMSL group making this new Louie logo a reality included Sheilley, Vice Chancellor of Strategic Enrollment Reggie Hill, Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications Justin Roberts and Director of Creative Services Traci Moore.

“As soon as I got here, they were like, ‘Hey, we want to talk to you about this idea we have,’” said Sheilley, who started at UMSL in August. “This was just a win-win.”

Scott Matthews, co-founder of the St. Louis-based creative agency Tremendousness, was hired to create the Louie logo.

“We had a lot of feedback through the process, and Scott was awesome,” Sheilley said. “We met every few weeks – Traci, Justin, Reggie and I – with him and went through different renditions of his teeth, the colors, his smile and everything. Scott is a great illustrator, the best in that area I’ve ever worked with.”

And this Louie logo is just the first piece of the equation.

“We’re going to do body poses and some friendlier-looking ones that can be used for academics or student orgs,” Moore said. “The Louie that we have now is strictly an athletic logo, and we also want something that students can use. We wanted to minimize people creating their own version of Louie, so now Louie has a formal look.”

For Matthews, creating the Louie logo was a labor of love. His company focuses primarily on information design, but he got his start with character design, and that’s where his passion resides.

“I want to really think through every last nuance of their face, every last nuance of the shape, the colors, the expression of their eyes,” Matthews said. “Are they smiling? Grimacing? What is their mouth saying? Their eyes? What’s their body language saying? That’s what I love to do. Every last aspect of Louie was thought through. You work through the process to figure out what is carrying the character forward with the personality traits that you want him to embody.”

The fins, Matthews pointed out as an example, give the feeling of a circular saw moving forward, with the notches showing Louie’s been through athletic battles and not just survived, but won. The lightning-esque lines with his teeth show aggressiveness and forward movement.

As part of his preparation, Matthews studied other logos.

“I looked at all the pro teams, and I looked at all the best college teams, just to get a sense of what they do with their logos and how much detail they have,” he said. “One of the things I noticed was they didn’t have a lot of shadowing. They didn’t have a lot of extraneous detail. They’re very flat, very crisp, very well-defined. And so in designing Louie, I was absolutely approaching this as if I was designing a logo for a professional football team. My goal from the beginning was to try to make Louie as good as any logo out there in college sports, period.”

For Matthews, a University of Missouri–Columbia graduate, designing the Louie logo ranks right up there with his career highlights.

“I’ve been designing stuff for 35 years, and I’ve done some fairly high-profile stuff for brands, newspapers, magazines and things like that, and they all made me very proud, but they’re also temporary,” Matthews said. “What I love about Louie is that he’s going to live on. I love that I’m doing something that’s highly recognized with our city, with the university, for the university system that I attended, for a mascot that’s really super-cool looking. I could not be more ecstatic that I get to do something that’ll have some lasting power, that people will see and, I hope, make them smile.”