Beyonce tells Rolling Stone why you belong at Tennessee. Kentucky sees a 30 for 30 film featuring you in the future. Georgia thinks you would look just fine in red and black -- and has already developed the portraits to prove it.

Welcome to the graphic design arm of the college football recruiting world, where the modern-day Mad Men of the sport reside.

😂😂😂😂😂 they snapped with this pic.twitter.com/dSCeiTInho

— Shy Tuttle (@KingTut_90) August 26, 2014

These are the guys behind the guys, tailoring posters and faux magazine covers to the Joey Five-Stars of the world and watching their works spread virally through word of mouth and the ever-friendly retweet button. They come from different corners of the athletic office, from the video department to the fundraising department. They bring with them athletic backgrounds and different tools. Like the athletes they work with, they carry short memories.

"We have to weigh the ideas before we send them out because any bad idea, and you're tap-dancing at that point and kind of backtracking and saying, 'Where did we go wrong?,'" said Jonathan King, Tennessee director of graphic design and branding.

The 32-year-old King has experienced no shortage of highlights in a tenure with the Volunteers that spans just a bit longer than that of second-year head coach Butch Jones. A fake Rolling Stone cover with Queen Bey herself -- aimed at ESPN four-star tackle Shy Tuttle last month -- was the latest in a wave of Tennessee recruiting efforts that sent social media into a frenzy.

King praised Jones for the creative freedom with which he allows King's department to operate, calling the coach an "idea guy."

"The first thing he said is, 'You're good at what you do. I'm a gas guy, not a brakes guy. So you go forward,'" King said.

King came to Knoxville after working for more than seven years at Alabama, where the Tuscaloosa native attended college. While with the Crimson Tide, King worked with Buddy Overstreet, whose duties ranged from producing highlight videos to designing media guide covers. During his tenure from 2005-13, Overstreet said his team grew from just him and King to roughly nine or 10 full-timers.

They have seen their value grow significantly here in the digital age, with recruiting more publicized and competitive than ever. An innovative graphic can go viral in a hurry, whereas standard mail takes several days to arrive and fails to leave much of an impact on anyone outside of the recipient's household.

"It's funny: You've got people that I follow on Twitter that I would consider industry titans in what I do, and they're struggling to get 2,000 followers," Overstreet said. "And you've got a kid who's a four- or five-star prospect and they're already in the thousands, their brands are exploding. So they're on that medium so much."

And they communicate with each other much more often. Fancy hashtags regularly take off among prospects pledged to the same schools, as they get to know each other before officially becoming teammates. Every recruit can see and share what others in that class have received from schools, and the right combination can catch fire quickly, creating the perfect social media storm.

Fake magazine covers like the one featuring Beyonce are hardly unique designs, but the right prospect and the right followers can help it spread. Tuttle -- the No. 1 player in North Carolina for the Class of 2015, with offers from virtually every national power -- has nearly 6,000 Twitter followers. His tweet of the periodical has garnered more than 500 retweets. The picture made "SportsCenter."

This also creates pressure for the senders, lest they appear out of touch when trying to connect with teenagers.

16 separate pieces of paper making one 30 for 30 poster! #WHYNOT #BBN #StoopsTroops pic.twitter.com/oTarvcP8Kw

— Logan_Stenberg (@LBStenberg) April 28, 2014

"My wife jokes I know all the new music and artists," said King, "but I have to, to remain culturally relevant to what these kids want to see."

The tenor of social media only heightens errors, with schools like Michigan gaining notoriety this offseason for misspelling "All-America" on a drawn-up ESPN The Magazine cover sent to eventual commit Mike Weber, a four-star running back.

When Overstreet left Alabama last August to start his own branding company, Perpetual Notion, he received a good-natured parting gift for his home office, a sign that read: "Designers are not English majors, so always check for mispellings." (The pun being that the last word was, ahem, misspelled.)

Overstreet, who joked that he is a disciple of Don Draper from “Mad Men,” said he is prudent about conflicts, as he tries to avoid working with rival schools or schools from the same conference.

Timing is everything with design. Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly used the example of May's NFL draft to demonstrate how important it is to turn something around quickly, as the Fighting Irish had eight players drafted this year, tied for second most nationally.

"It's always about sense of urgency, right?" said Kelly shortly after the draft, adding, "My eight draftable players, I want something out right now, and I want it all over the place. [If] it comes tomorrow, that's a little late. I like it yesterday."

The most rewarding work, however, is often marketed to the widest range of consumers. King considers Tennessee's "Rise to the Top" campaign, which marked the start of the Jones era, his proudest moment during his time with the Volunteers. The slogan played off the school's "Rocky Top" theme while speaking of a road and not a destination. A public relations blitz featured a donor website and area billboards plastered with the new coach's image. King likened it to "the process" theme that has become so intertwined with Alabama, which itself needed a new identity before Nick Saban arrived in 2007.

"I had never been a part of creating something that spread so quickly, and it was fun to see it generate its own momentum outside of what I was doing," said King of Tennessee's campaign. "Fans took ahold of it and used it in hashtags."

That might be a foreign term to King's 1960s predecessors, but who knew some of their Madison Avenue ideals would take root in athletic departments half a century later?