Football Programme Covers - National Football Museum Research Trip

Yesterday Joe and I went to the National Football Museum in Manchester to look at how the aesthetics of football have changed over time and for inspiration for our own work. We took the below photographs. I was particularly interested in looking at the typography of old books and programme covers.

I reached the following conclusions:

• The programme/book covers that had the clearest hierarchies used a lot of full capital type.
• More often than not sans-serif fonts are used alongside images so as not to distract from the images, often these fonts are thick woodblock-like fonts.
• Very few gradients, tints, and shades are used, instead the colour tends to be in the form of saturated blocks.
• The grid doesn't necessarily need to be set up using vertical and horizontal lines, there are numerous examples of diagonal grids that work really well.
• Changing the colour of particular words is often a more effective way of creating a hierarchy than changing the font because of the importance of colour association.
• The placement of text often seems to work around what images they're with and how important they are rather than there being a balance between the two.

From this trip Joe also suggested we collaborate on doing a series of posters for the 2016 European Championships after being impressed with this poster in particular.

This is something we'll look at doing in the future.