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.