Nike Elite 51 Steelers Uniform Tweak

Pittsburgh Steelers.

This is the 20th of many uploads for this Nike/NFL tweaking project. For those unfamiliar, the idea is to take each team's current uniform and "tweak" it, but stay in the general range of the current designs. This includes doing things such as: putting aside the striped compression sleeves that I usually add to a uniform that contains stripes on the "sleeves" of the jersey; not just blowing the current uniform up and starting from scratch; not just simply going with a throwback uniform as the solution; and various other new methods that I can't think of at the moment. Every team will be wearing my tweaked version of the Nike Speed Machine uniform. All Nike/NFL uniform tweaks are done with a combination of MS Paint and GIMP.

With the move to Nike, the Steelers kinda upgraded this year and kinda downgraded this year. They upgraded because the Nike Speed Machine uniform is very much superior to the previous fabrics and cuts IMO, but they downgraded in one key aspect: the sleeve stripes. For this year’s uniforms, the sleeve stripes on both jersey tops look to be the same size as before; maybe even bigger, and the construction of the sleeve caps (or whatever they’re called) results in the bottom stripe(s) disappearing on all of the sleeves except for Big Ben’s (and probably a small handful of Kickers, Punters, backup QB’s, etc.). The seemingly easy thing to do is to blame Nike for making the sleeves so small, but that’s an invalid argument, as most uniform manufacturers make sleeves so small, that they leave little room for stripes. It’s not just Nike. I ultimately blame the Steelers, because they had the most say in the transition from Reebok to Nike. They could've requested smaller sleeve stripes to remedy the problem. What I did here was just that: decrease the size of the stripes. I also put them in black cleats, as it should be for the Steelers. A small detail that some may miss is that the Steelers’ numbers are closer together this year (2012). I don’t hate that look at all, but I prefer the old way of doing the numbers, simply because it’s slightly more legible to my eyes. Everything else stays the same. Home uniform is on the left, road uniform is on the right.

The template and original artwork that these modifications (tweaks) are generated from comes with the permission of the original artist, Bill Schaefer, at GridironUniforms.com.