New York City Football Club Neck Tape

Joe showed me this brief as he thought I may be interested in it - the link to the brief can be found here, but in summary it's a competition to design the neck tape for New York City FC's football kit. Neck tape is positioned on the inside of the collar just above the label that has the size and washing instructions. It's positioning makes it mostly decorative as any important information is on the label itself.

The brief suggests sticking to the NYC FC colours, and gave a navy blue background as a template, for this reason I imaging the tape is to be designed primarily for the away kit - the home and away kits are shown respectively below.

The away shirt is quite extravagant in its use of colour, so I was keen to try and include orange, light blue and white in the design.

The image used on the webpage for the competition is below, leading me to believe that the text the want included is "This City Never Sleeps" and "This Is Your City". The neck tape on the previous kit suggests they want to emphasise the word City.

The typeface I chose to use was Gotham Black at 12pt and 10pt as New York City FC are a very new team and as such the font needed to reflect this, which Gotham does, especially in America because of it's use in Obama's hope campaign, which was a very big cultural step forward for the country. I used the black weight specifically as football has quite an unsubtle asthetic, and the black weight matches this, large tracking complimented the thick letterforms.

The orange has a really horrible contrast with the blues so I made sure to keep it's use minimal, I found the best way to incorporate this was a line to separate the two lines of text. The word City is in white to highlight its importance by the large tonal contrast between it and the dark blue background, the rest of the text is therefore in light blue to make use of every colour.

I then altered it to see how it'd adapt to the home shirt which is a lot quieter in its use of colour. There's no orange in the home version as it would look out of place.

Elmwood Brief

Elmwood gave us an hour to work in groups of 4 to pitch a concept for a business idea we were given. I worked on this with Alex, Melissa and Eva, we had to work on a toast cafe.

We were told specifically to think about the name, aesthetics, tone, and story of the brand we were creating.

Name
Butter Side Up: Appropriate because of the link with Sunny Side Up, which links to eggs and breakfast. The link to the word sunny in particular gives of a positive message.

Aesthetics and Tone
Comfortable, Relaxed, Cosy and Homely: Given that people tend to eat breakfast in the morning when they're tired the atmosphere of the cafe needs to feel all these things to make the customer feel like they're eating in their own home. The aesthetics will be rustic and hand-drawn to match this.

Brand Story
Someone dropped their slice of toast and it defied the laws of physics to land butter side up, they thought it was a sign and were inspired to dedicate their life to providing people with their perfect slice of toast.

City Under The Floorboards

I was contacted by Simon Pickles who was working on an independent film called City Under The Floorboards, he asked me if I could do a logo for the film.

After seeing the initial sketches people working on the film had made and seeing the mood board they linked me too, I had a rough idea of what sort of thing was needed for the logo.

I e-mailed them the following three screenshots, the logo, and how the logo could work as an image for a social media page.

The layout of the text is similar to one of the ideas they sent me, but slightly more aligned. I incorporated the gender symbols into the double O, making the female one more prominent than the male to represent the control she has in the relationship in the film. The horizontal line from the female symbol separates the top and bottom halves of the logo like floorboards, with the silhouette of a city skyline pointing downwards to try and stress the idea of it being under the floorboards. The lights that are switched on in the buildings are meant to be somewhat of a reflection of the lettering in the top half to try and add balance to the logo. I chose to use Avenir bold because it's quite bulky and clear without being overly masculine.

I'm going to wait until I hear back from them before I do anything more on this project.

Poster For 'Travelling Man Presents BA Hons Illustration Party'

Joe Shiels asked me to design a poster to fill a gap at an exhibition he's helping to curate, 'Travelling Man Presents BA Hons Illustration Party'.

The exhibition is heavily illustrative, and so the poster needed to not overshadow any of the illustrations, so Joe requested it be type only and stuck to the colour scheme of the exhibition. 

I used he golden ratio to try and make it as discrete as possible, this was chosen because of how the golden spiral occurs naturally in nature and the eye/brain thinks nothing of it when we see it. Futura is the typeface used because it’s fairly narrow, allowing me to use just one line for the third line of text while still having it at a large scale. The difference between the cap height and the ascenders also gives it an imperfect feel which matches the grid.