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.