Meet Mike Jones, the Charlotte Creative Redefining Sports Design

Mike Jones is a transformative figure in the Charlotte arts scene, but he won’t tell you as much. The designer who has created Black Excellence jerseys for three professional sports teams in the Carolinas over the last three years will instead demur, telling you that as a Raleigh native, he’s just catching up with the Queen City changemakers.

He will cite the musicians in our ever-expanding scene, folks like Reuben Vincent, Mavi, Lute and Cyanca who have been driving musical innovation in Charlotte for years. He’ll shout out the real photographers who paved the way like Kevin “Surf” Mitchell and Marc Prosper. He’ll insist that the real heavy hitters are the folks who run artist collectives like Dammit Wesley and Sir Will the Artist at BLKMKTCLT. He’ll point to community leaders like Archive CLT owner Cheryse Terry or Ken Koontz, the city’s first Black reporter.

And if you congratulate him on his MidSouth Emmy nomination for the short film “Home is Where the Harte Is,” which introduced the Charlotte Hornets Black Excellence jersey — a league first — in February, no sooner than “Thank you” has left his lips will he immediately divert to heaping praise on his collaborators on the project.

He’ll applaud Kiyana Christopher, the short film’s director, for her vision and professionalism. He’ll commend the careful hand of one of his frequent collaborators, Wyeth Collins, as the camera operator and editor.

Just a brief glance at the other nominations in Jones’ category, Branded Content – Short Form Content (up to 10 minutes), shows Jones’s ethic as a creative director. The other nominees on the list credit one to three creators each. “Home is Where the Harte Is” lists 12.

“I’ll tell you, the people that I worked with on that project are some of the most talented people I’ve ever met in my life,” Jones told the Queen City Nerve. “Seeing their reaction was literally made me be like, ‘Yo, like, my cup is full.’”

As much as Jones will refract any spotlight shone on him to those around him, it is his vision that propelled the piece to a place where it has been recognized by both the Emmy and Clio awards. That vision has been slowly taking shape throughout his career as a photographer, creative director and most recently as a digital designer.

Finding his way from football to photography

Jones didn’t always consider himself an artist, or even a creative. After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Sports Management from Liberty University in Virginia in 2018, he returned home to North Carolina and began working as a recruiting intern with Wake Forest University’s football program in Winston-Salem.

He aspired to become a football coach, but after seeing that life up close, he developed doubts about his career path. Coaches had to be fully dedicated to the sport, often spending more time with players than with their own families. Not ready to commit his life to a sport, he began exploring other options.

Jones’s work at Wake had connected him to the creative sectors of the sports ecosystem, managing the music for the team’s practices in addition to his other duties.

He pursued that seemingly minor task with the same passion he could have been putting toward recruiting.

“I live through music,” he said. “Everything has to be involved in music in some way, because I feel like life has to be in harmony.”

Jones’s life has been defined by harmonies since growing up in the church, where he learned to play piano by ear with the guidance of his dad, a musician in his own right. When he wasn’t listening to gospel, he became ensconced in the world of hip-hop, finding inspiration from the likes of Kanye West, Big Sean, and fellow North Carolinian J. Cole.

While he was curating the music for Wake football practices, he began paying close attention to the other ways in which media and creative expression defined the sports experience.

One day, his curiosity propelled him to make his way down to Wake Forest’s sports videography department to explore one of the most powerful mediums in the sports world: photography.

Originally told to start out with a point-and-shoot technique to get a handle on the art form, Jones became a self-described student of YouTube University.

“I was really looking up on my phone how to learn settings and such while I’m shooting practice,” he recalled.

He picked up on the basics, then started to pay attention to how his photos were being used. Unhappy with the graphics that his pictures were being used in, his autodidactic impulse kicked in again, this time exploring graphic design. Even as he began to get work published in that department, he felt more part of the sports world than the arts world.

As he practiced, researched, and practiced some more, Jones began to develop a photographic style that became his signature, his aperture freezing a microsecond in time, transforming moment to memory in ways that feel monumental.

“We all have internal cameras with us,” Jones explained. “Our body is internal cameras in our DNA. It’s like every moment we’re going through our lives, we’re just capturing to keep in our bank of our own internal cameras.”

He wanted his photos to feel like those moments captured by our internal cameras, creating a sense of familiarity and awe that we feel when we recall a particularly poignant moment in a game, a musician’s set, or an everyday memory.

To explain how he approaches that goal, once again, he turns again to music.

“I want every single photo I take to be album-cover worthy. That’s literally what I drew on, inspiration for my graphics,” he said. “A lot of my photos [are inspired] from album covers and movie posters.”

His style gained attention, leading to opportunities shooting events away from sports, starting with Trippie Redd’s October 2021 tour stop in Raleigh. He went on to shoot performances from artists like Chris Brown and H.E.R. at venues like Spectrum Center in Charlotte and Red Hat Amphitheater in his hometown of Raleigh, plus the Dreamville Festival in Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Park.

He moved to Charlotte in 2022 to take a job as a photographer and digital designer with the Charlotte Hornets. On the side, he began shooting the artists who have defined this era of the Queen City as a way of entering that very community.

It wasn’t long before Jones would get the opportunity to connect these two communities with a project that saw his day job and creative passions collide.

Designing the Charlotte Hornets Black Excellence Jersey

Throughout 2024, Jones worked on developing the team’s Black Excellence jersey, a first of its kind in the NBA, to be revealed by the team in February 2025 in observation of Black History Month.

The jersey pays homage to the Black communities that have often served as the cultural vanguard in a city that rarely acknowledges their vitality and centrality to its identity. Dogwood petals, North Carolina’s state flower, pepper the letters around “Charlotte,” with the letters H, A, R, T, and E highlighted in gold trim.

This gold motif is present throughout as an homage to the importance of the precious metal to Black style globally and as a marker of cultural wealth. The number four represents the shorthand nickname for Charlotte that comes from the city’s original area code, 704.

Finally, the gold pinstripes feature the names of prominent Black neighborhoods in Charlotte history like Enderly Park, Grier Heights, and Brooklyn Village.

“This is my gift to city of Charlotte,” Jones explained upon the jersey’s release. “I’m not from Charlotte. However, Charlotte is the reason why I got to the level where I’m at now.”

Charlotteans returned the love, lining up around the block at the Spectrum Center for the exclusive Hornets store release. But the jersey wasn’t the end of the project; Jones’s next step was to showcase his work with a short film.

Bridging Charlotte’s arts, music, and sports worlds

Jones called up folks like Mavi, Lute, Cheryse Terry, and others for the video shoot. They were eager to sign on because of the work he had already done to bridge the community with the Hornets organization.

“Mike is like, one of my favorite people to work with in the city,” Mavin, named Charlotte’s best rapper in Queen City Nerve’s 2022 Best in the Nest issue, told us.

The short film that accompanied the release interestingly didn’t include any sports references. Instead, images of Black Charlotte flicker in a montage with prominent figures like Mavi, Lute and Terry modeling the jersey with narration from David Butler and Ziante Solano.

Read more: Lute Talks ‘Gold Mouf,’ Anxiety and Dreamville Before First Local Headlining Gig (2024)

For Jones, this choice was intentional; the jersey was not a love letter to the Hornets or the sports organizations around the city. Rather, it was a chance for these organizations to show up for Black Charlotte.

For Mavi, this was a particularly poignant aspect of the project.

“The jersey has the names of the streets that we ran and lived on and built memories on and loved each other on and created on,” he said. “So for us to show that in action spoke to what the message of the jersey was, more than it being a basketball thing.”

Jones was careful to focus the energy of the project on these sites that are monumental in their banality, beautiful in how they make up this city’s geographical and spiritual DNA.

While banking, finance and sports corporations may be the engines of our city’s economy, Jones’s project highlights the ways in which these engines can drive artistic innovation in a city with world-class yet underrecognized photographers, designers and musicians.

This significance was not lost on Archive CLT owner and West End stalwart Terry, who reflected, “Although our customers validate us as a business, to be recognized by a corporation kind of gives it another level of validity and another stamp of approval. I feel like it opens the doors for us to be able to work with other bigger brands when we’ve been cosigned by such a big brand like the Hornets.”

With the city at his back, Jones’ major accolades are simply well-deserved garnish. He said he wasn’t surprised by the nomination.

“I was more just thankful to get that platform and to give that recognition to the people involved in that project,” he said.

Designing a new career path

This nomination means more to Jones than acknowledgement of his work and the work of Charlotte creatives. It’s also a hallmark of a new creative endeavor for him: design. This is the third Black Excellence jersey that Jones has designed, following similar work for Charlotte FC in 2023 and the Carolina Hurricanes in 2024.

His interest in design took root as his photography work was slowing down in the city, and he’s experiencing a great deal of momentum as he explores this new self-taught creative avenue.

“I told myself, literally a couple weeks ago, I have to accept that I am a designer now,” he said.

Jones is now designing new pieces every day, building a portfolio around sports design to buttress his already impressive body of work. While sports design has become his primary focus, music continues to drive everything he does.

Instead of thinking of his photos as an album cover, however, now the music is all in the look.

As much as Jones redirects the praise that he receives to his colleagues and collaborators, his body of work merits the acclaim that is directed his way. He offers the best of what an artist can offer to a city — a meeting place beyond traditional boundaries, a different way of doing things, and a vision that we all can share.

Jones’s body of work — in both photography and design — meets benchmarks that some work their whole careers to meet. More impressive is his unwavering ethic to bring the city with him.

Mike Jones is a transformative figure in the Charlotte arts scene, but he won’t tell you that. Instead, he shows us that we simply use the best that we have around us to create the best work that we can. Our city might be more than a new ZARA or Sweetgreen, more than Wells Fargo or Truists, and more than how our sports teams are doing.

In the hands of folks like Jones, Charlotte can be a place where creatives leverage the resources of corporations to show us a better way to be, a way that preserves history rather than developing over it.

Charlotte can be a place where the relationship between corporation and community doesn’t come through nominal initiatives but a grounded ethics of living together, working together and succeeding together.

In short, in the hands of artists like Mike Jones, Charlotte could have an identity.

The Nashville/MidSouth Emmy Awards ceremony will take place on Feb. 14, 2026.

Read More: Charlotte’s Black History projects produced by Queen City Nerve