Football Programme Covers - Rough Illustrations, Colour Variations, and Spine Text

The process Joe goes through to make his illustrations requires a high-quality image to start with, something we struggled to source for the Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday covers - particularly ones where the players are in suitable positions to fit into the grid. We ended up choosing photo's knowing we'd have to rotate the images slightly for them to fit. Earlier today Joe sent me rough copies of his drawings for me to make sure they fit into the grid:

Both fit in the grid with a bit of compromise. The Sheffield United program needed to move the sub-text on the front cover from the left side of the page to the right, and the Sheffield Wednesday player's head will overlay the heading text slightly and will be covered by league's logo slightly. We don't see these as being major problems.

Joe had mentioned he'd like to see how the programmes looked with the colours reversed to potentially use for European or Cup games to differentiate them from league games. I tried this with the Liverpool and Everton covers to the below result.

Joe and I both agree that these don't work as well, primarily because the colour background is too bright. Whilst the images would stand out more if we made them fully black and white, this would detract from the importance of the illustration, which is what these programmes have been designed around in order to attract a younger audience. For this reason we won't be pursuing them any further.

I also added on the names of the clubs to the bottom of the spine as per Joe's suggestion along with the season the programme is from. This makes the programme more identifiable by their club when on a busy shelf.

Harri Larkin - Website Mocks

Before working on layouts for Harri Larkin's mock website I looked at the websites for Ramones - the band whose logo was used as inspiration for Harri Larkin's logo, and Linkin Park, a band who's website I've found to be functional in past experience.

I looked at the homepage and news page (the two pages I'm doing mock-ups of) as well as from the shop page to make sure the layout is usable for various pages.

Neither of the two websites seem to have consistant layouts, something which I plan on changing. Overlaying the three pages on top of each other allowed me to create guides on the page to create a simplified grid that would work for the content - this resulted in a couple of rows and the top for a menu a bar, 3 or 4 columns for content, and a row at the bottom that acts as a border. This is the guidance I'll be using as it appears to be a way to make functional websites look more visually consistent.

The simplicity of the layout meant I didn't have to stray far from the very rough sketch I did for the home page and it translated into a news page pretty easily. The background of the page is a photo the band provided me with made slightly transparent over the texture used for the logo. The star and dots in the logo are incorporated into the banner to extend the visual continuity. The typeface used are London (the typeface used in the logo) and London Fill to create a simple hierarchy, body copy is Gotham to keep it simple and modern.

It was suggested to me that the menu bar was too thick and bold to match the rest of the pages - making it thinner and the same opacity as the white boxes solved this problem. This also resulted in the logo being made bigger on the home page and the content boxes being shifted upwards on the news page.

Harri Larkin - Contextual Mock-Ups

Mocks that show how the logo works in context.

Freya Williams Self-Promotion - Final Folder Changes and Belly-Bands

Freya had given me the text for the inside left page, so I updated that. I also added tabs to the bottom which will make the flap more securely glued in. In a final attempt to get Freya to use plain white borders I sent her a copy of the file that was set up with white borders as well as the way she wanted it, so she has no reason not to print it.

I positioned the belly-bands on the offcuts to save printing costs for Freya.

The Saucy Fish Co - Mocks and Submission Boards

Having finalised the layouts for the packaging I filled in the information using text from The Saucy Fish Co's online shop - this allowed me to position the text in a way that I knew would have enough room to contain all the necessary information. To do this it was necessary to use 6pt text, so I made sure to use white text on the black background to make the text as readable as possible.

Because the text for the ingredient list had to be so small the text for nutritional values and baking instructions was small to match this, meaning there wasn't any information that needed to go on the bottom of the packaging. This gap was subsequently filled with the logo to help the packaging be recognised were it to be stacked in such a way that the bottom of the packaging was visible.

I then used the mock-up template I created to show how the final products would look.

Using these mock-ups and the nets for the packaging I produced the below PDF to submit to YCN. It'll be easy to modify these for my extended practice submission.

Freya Willaims Self-Promotion - Changes

Freya sent me these images for me to size and position myself, this would allow me to be sure they'd be the same size as the other photo placed above the pattern. In order to make sure of this I edited them to look how they do below.

I then made some other changes which I'd discussed with Freya briefly, these were:

• Adding a white border to the logo to make it more prominent.
• Change the borders of the images from black to white, making them less prominent and more feminine.
• Use Quiksand Light for body copy rather than Quiksand Regular to thin the text, this makes the body text less obvious than it currently does as the only use of black.
• Change the background colour to the lightest pink from the colour sheet I sent to Freya - she decided she wanted to keep the background pink put make it very light.
• Removed her phone number as she requested under advice from her tutor.
• Re-positioned one of the velcro patches to be in the correct position having noticed ir was placed incorrectly in the test print.

The folder looks like this now - it looks more feminine although most of the changes won't really make much difference until it's printed.

I then looked at where the cuts on the cover would sit on the inside page if we chose to hold the business card in this way. I found that by using just two cuts I we'd have negligible encroachment over the images and none over any text. This is preferable than sticking some flaps on the front cover of the folder as it adds less complications to the process.