By Country

Thursday 16 July 2009

Racing Santander, Arminia Bielefeld

Right so I got bored with just making the shirts, well not bored but their wasn't really anything to them was their? So I have slightly adjusted the and picked things from my older shirt templates, the socks are a completely new addition though as I thought all my previous ones looked quite pish.

May I just say I am really quite pleased with this design, I had been thinking about it for quite a while and then when I made it I thought it came out looking really good. To show it off properly I needed to pick a team which used three colours on their home strip, so Santander was quite ideal using white-green-black and also Bielefeld using pretty much the same but blue instead of green.

The main concept was the cross over at the back of the collar, umbro have already used a similar notion on it's kits and leisure wear a few years ago with it's 'X-static' but they never really incorporated an actual X shape into their shirts so in my mind it is still original.

As you know lines wrapping themselves around shirts in an interesting way is pretty much what I am into when designing and this is no different, I have also mixed this in with a healthy dose of spikes (sounds like bondage :S) something I also like to include quite a bit of in my designs. I think what actually makes this on of my best designs is that it is adaptable to any sort of shirt whether it contains stripes, hoops, different colour shoulders or whatever.

Enough of my BS though onto the strips themselves. Santander seem to be the perpetual bottom half of the table team in La Liga with only a few top half finishes in their 41 seasons of top flight football. The team have never really harboured any world class players either, which may be a reason behind this but they have had Yossi Benayoun, which is good enough for me :D

That wasn't really about the kit was it? Well now it is. I have used all of Santander's three main colours on this home kit, three colours which fit very well together in my opinion and make me think that they are part of a long footballing history, I really can't explain what I mean properly, just I think that the colours would be well suited to a black and white photo in a newspaper of a player with exuberant hair stood with hands on hips looking serious. The 'castle' on the shirt is the Torro del Oro which features on both Cantabrian and Santander's coat of arms which (apparantly) symbolizes regional power. The collar itself is a plain wrap over collar but with two different colours that wrap around into a mesh design on the actual shirt. The shorts also incorporate this X design but the socks are a bit more traditional looking, I did toy with making the socks into the same style but it just looked too much when I tried it.


The away does away with the different coloured shoulders that featured on the home kit and replaces with a black number but has a trim of green and white which again uses the X design to a good effect I think. The font is a pretty plain one, I forget the name of it, but I jazzed it up by slicing through it, I maybe could have personalised it a bit more but I was quite happy with this look.



Arminia Bielefeld are a recently relegated team from the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. Who, like Santander, have never really won anything except from 2nd division titles, so they are possibly the perfect accompaniment for them. I have been quite a fan of Bielefeld's bold usage of both white and black on top of royal blue on the shirt, and especially the usage of a chest band. I tried to reinvent this with my design, using the bridge featured in their 'Stadtwappen' city coat of arms. I am still undecided as to whether this works or not so your comments will help here. I have again opted for differing colour shoulders, not that my template isn't versatile or anything :P


On the away kit I went with an orange colour that they have worn before with black as the trim colour but I have tried it with white and the chest band again, I was to lazy to change it really.

And a visitor from the Maldives!!! Thank you very much indeed.

1 comment:

  1. that away of racing, amazing!

    the other good too, but not so good...

    again congratulations!

    ReplyDelete