Kits Trikot Camisas Maillot

Portugal Casualwear

2009-12-18T20:16:00.003Z

Here are some vest tops I made for a few Portuguese teams I am quite please with how the came out...

C.F. Os Belenenses
Leixões S.C.
Rio Ave F.C.

Not dead, but dieing

2009-12-16T13:33:00.004Z

I have been quite busy in many ways so no posting and I think future posting may be at long integers like this too due to lack of time, and a slight lack of interest but this of course may change for me in the future, we'll see.

Just a quick post for these Turkish casual shirts, I personally wouldn't wear shirts like this with printing, but I have been wearing a few plaid shirts recently which gave me the idea to try something.

If you don't like them then fkdsfdskjasdfds.

Kayserispor KulübüDenizlispor KulübüAnkaraspor Anonim Şirketi

Casualwear (Russia)

2009-10-30T13:47:00.006Z

For the next few posts I'll be displaying something a little different from kits, but still football related so don't despair. Basically what I have made are a few t-shirts and stuff such as that which you would wear in everyday life 'casually'. For my choice in teams I just used a random number generator and went with whatever it picked and then counted it on the UEFA list then, associated numbers with teams in the league it picked and drew numbers again so it was a totally random process.

Well the first number drawn gave me the Russian leagues to choose from. From that, I made sure it was just the top two leagues to choose so I would at least know something about the team. First team out of the hat, so to speak, was Luch-Energiya Vladivostok of the Russian First Division (below the premier league). Luckily I know a little about them and their geographic remoteness makes them quite an anomaly in European football. If they were in a European competition and drew an Icelandic team it may be the first time a team have had to fly across America to get to their European tie as it would be closer than going trans-Europe.

When I set out to make casualwear I wanted the shirts to have original qualities unrelated to the club combined with history, so a mix of the old and new. With the Vladivostok t-shirt I was inspired a bit by American basketball shirts and I stuck with this idea for it, using a kind of Americana writing, I have also used a kind of 80's/early 90's style star shapes with solid colour bands to give a funky retro look. The blue colour scheme in one that features in Vladivostok's home shirt although as a secondary colour behind yellow. The tiger is from the teams logo and inside the collar is an old map of the Vladivostok region with the word Восток (Vostok - Russian for East) highlighted. I realise now looking at these I have made the collar far too small, just poor drawing from me.

Second out of this mystery hat was current and maybe soon to be consecutive champions, Rubin Kazan. Kazan has a rich history being the capital of the tartar region, which is actually where the club colours come from, the flag of Taratarstan. So I thought it was quite important I included these making the majority of the shirt an unusual shade of dark green with a reasonably light red to highlight it. I have given this t-shirt more of a grungy look as I thought it suited the colours quite well. Also featuring on this shirt is a huge star highlighting their success in last season's premier league, a bit Hollywood styl-e, their is the Kazan dragon and the coat of arms of Tartarstan within the collar.

Finally is FK Moskva, the government owned capital side. They are quite a newish team just like Midtjylland were being founded in only 1997 but only being known as FK Moskva since 2004, I have gone with a burgundy colour which is similar of that of their shirts. The spirally shape is a bit random but I also think it has a bit of an element of the space race look to it, so in that way fits with a government owned team, in the collar is the coat of arms of Moscow as I had no better ideas.

FC Midtjylland

2009-10-29T19:09:00.005Z

Located in the centre of Denmark, Midtjylland (literally central Jutland) are a very recently formed team, having existed for only 10 years they have spent all but one year in the top Danish league they have made some very respectable season finishes including 2 second placed ones and runners up in the Danish cup, but actual honours have are still yet to materialise for them. Some of their star players over the past few years have been Mohammed Zidan who made his name at the team scoring 30 goals in just one season, who due to this actually had his shirt number 14 retired in his honour. Another player who may be familiar to fans of the English leagues and who features on the shirt is former Derby County and West Bromwich Albion defender Martin Albrechtsen.

For the shirt I used the same design as I had previously for Brescia and Tromsø but as Midtjylland only have a short recent history I have thrown in some unusual elements to make it a bit more striking and engaging on the eye. The 'traditional' colours of the team are red and black so I ran with this as to gain a tradition it would need to build up after many years. The teams nickname is 'Ulvene' which is 'The Wolves' in Danish, and if you look closely at the logo you can make out a wolves face too which I though was just some kind of odd wican symbol to start with, so I decide to try something which looks roughly like it has been torn by a wolf's paw so the stripes flow in an unusual way. I have also made the shoulders unsymmetrical to give more of an unusual look to the shirt.

For the away I have opted for a neutral white colour with black and red elements of the home shirt. You can also see the unsymmetrical look of the shoulders in the red a lot better than you could on the home.

Tromsø & Brescia

2009-10-28T18:59:00.004Z

Hello again and welcome to another edition of more kits, I'll cut out some of the usual waffle though, but I can't promise that.

Today I am posting up kits I have made for Tromsø I.L. of the Norwegian Tippeligaen and Brescia Calcio of Italian Serie B they use the same new template as the previous Kielce and Saturn kits but a different design, I am however more pleased with how this one turned out. I have returned to a symmetrical design instead and it doesn't look as unusual but I think in comparison this rises above the other by having better elements on the sleeve and a nicer looking collar and pleasant flicks here and there.

Tromsø I.L. are the most northern most premier football team in the world so come as a bit of a novelty to me for this reason. I would like to hear of other team who may be further north who are in lowers leagues though. Tromsø always pose a difficult test in both domestic and European competitions due to a mix of the climate and skill of the players who are used to such conditions. In their '97 Cup Winners' Cup run they managed to defeat Chelsea 3-2 at home in blizzard conditions only to be turned over 7-1 in the return leg and Stamford Bridge. In their 2006 UEFA Cup run they also managed to defeat both Galatasaray and Red Star Belgrade, but still finished bottom in the group stage.

Their kit is traditionally red and white stripes so it was important I didn't play with that too much, the rest of the kit is just something I thought looked good, involving both curves and sharp angles resulting in a bit of a flame look on the sleeve which wasn't on purpose, it just happened like that. The shorts and socks are sort of knock off of Nike designs, the socks are pretty much identical, but the shorts do have their own unique look.

The away throws together the identifiable red and white of the home with a distinguished blue colour, a colour which is pretty regularly used as an away colour by the club, the collar can also be seen a lot better on this than the home, I have given it a quite dynamic sharp look something that was missing quite a bit from the previous designs.

Now on to Brescia, a perennial Italian yo-yo team to say the least. They have bounced all around the Italian league system for their near 100 year history having employed a wealth of talent in that time, probably most famously Roberto Baggio even retiring the number 10 shirt in his honour for a 4 year stint at the end of his career. Currently Brescia are competing in Serie B, the Italian second division and only just missed out by result of promotion playoffs to get back into the top flight football.

These Brescia kits are among some of the favourites I have made, I think they're really classy even though they're quite minimal and the touch of gold from the logo really sets off the kit. I also think it helps that they have a minimalist looking sponsor logo in the shape of the 'Banco di Brescia' logo.

The away, predictably is just a reversal of colours from the home shirt, not much else to say other than that.

Sorry that I waffled.

Once again...

2009-10-25T01:55:00.007+01:00

Sorry for the long time between posts, I recently tranferred a lot of files to my external hard drive including kits I had made but then it stopped working *sigh* so I couldn't get anything for sometime but luckily it is back and operating as normal so I can show you something I have made, quite some time ago now.

To be honest though I've not made a great deal either due to a combination of mental blocks and lack of desire, but I do have stuff I can post up.

The first two teams which I am going to be displaying today are from Eastern Europe, and one of which I have already posted something up on, but didn't go into any detail about the club at all, so I'll do that now shall I?

Korona Kielce, from Kielce funnily enough, that's in Poland and currently compete in the Polish Ekstraklasa. A team I follow to an extent because of a Polish friend of mine, it was my first and only real affiliation with any Polish team so I consider them to be my team there. They have quite a checkered history involving promotion, relegation, corruption, new stadium and even challenging for European places. the team was founded in 1973 from a merger between two teams and since then they have further merged with other teams to become what is recognized as Korona Kielce today. 2002 is pretty much when I first heard about them and funnily enough (yeh quite humorous mood today) they started what wikipedia describes as their golden age began with their rise to the Ekstraklasa from the 3rd division no less. On the back of this success they have had a new stadium constructed and even made a fifth placed finish in the league, two years later however along with Zagłębie Lubin they were relegated to the second division for their part in a corruption scandal. All has worked out now though and are back flying high in Poland.

The kit is in their traditional yellow and red stripes with yellow shorts and yellow socks. I wanted to try something asymmetrical with my design as I had noticed a slight pattern emerging so I mixed it up a little with the kit of low sash you can see, (this will be more apparent on the next team I show you). The collar is inspired a bit from one of Adidas' old 'uns and is supposed to look a little turtle neck like just hugging a little but not constricting the throat. Their are also flicks of black over the shirt as a tertiary colour it is also a colour Kielce regularly use in their designs. The shorts are also asymmetrical but again you will be able to see this more clearly on my next kit.

For the away I have used black as the main colour with yellow as a secondary, black is regularly used as change strip in real life also. With this you can also see the asymmetrical design on the shirt better.

My second team I am covering with this design is Saturn Ramenskoye or now known as FC Saturn Moscow Oblast (Сатурн Московская область) a Russian team who if I am honest i don't know a great deal about so excuse me while I recite a wiki article to you. Based in Ramenskoye / Ра́менское on the far outskirts of Moscow they are nicknamed the Aliens because of the Saturn name, which I don't have the foggiest where it comes from at all. The club have had limited success in their history but have managed, like Kielce, to come from the 3rd division to the first in the space of 5 years and have cemented themselves as a regular in the league, citing a 5th placed finish, again like Kielce, as their best to date. Oh one last thing they also boast a record of fielding the oldest scoring player in the Russian Premier League which was Sergei Natalushko at the age of 39 against Lokomotiv Moscow.

The team are also known for playing in black-blue stripes but I ditched this in favour of predominantly blue with dark blue as the secondary colour. The shoulders are in dark blue as well as the 'sash' across the kit, the sleeves are mainly white just cut of by the dark blue spikes. As I told you before you can see the shorts properly on this kit, giving them almost half each colour and white at the sides. The socks are also an amalgamation of the three colours.

The away strip is a grey and blue number much in the same style as the home just with a few tweaks to where the colour on the template is located.

I suppose I should post something.

2009-09-24T16:42:00.005+01:00

Well as promised I will explain that ghastly last set of kits, just looking at them again now and they aren't pretty are they, not sure what I was attempting but here goes nothing, I'll try and explain it.

It started by just putting a few lines together in photoshop, see if something would work and look right. Once I got that "right" I set about changing the cut of the shirt which was quite stale and sameish in a lot of my previous kits. I also wanted to try a something little different for the collar, well, different for me anyway. So I decided on a fold collar with extra detail I guess you would call it, beneath the collar itself kind of reminiscent of what Real Madrid used on their centenary kits, just a bit more shit though. I also wanted to add in some sort of design feature that would stay with the design along the range of teams I would make with it. For this I decided the hoops I used on Club Africain would be an ideal choice (on the underside of the sleeves only) and I still stand by this decision, even though it has been criticised a bit. This is why there are hoops on the Atlas kits which don't have a tradition of using them.

I did buckle however when I was making these Dinamo Zagreb kits and change the hoops to checkers to fit in with their rich history in Croatia. I chose Dinamo (not to offend them with this shite template) because they are another team which are a bit special to me. I once sneaked into their Maximir Stadium, not when any games were on, but when it was abandoned, it was quite an experience that's for sure, and this Dinamo caravan is an enduring image which is definitely going to stay with me for a long time. Another reason is that the place I was staying in Zagreb was of course ran by Dinamo fans and because I showed an interest in Dinamo they gave me lots of free beer and were very funny people!

Dinamo are of course one of the strongest and most popular teams in Croatia, only rivalled really by Hajduk Split. They have produced a lot of Croatia's most talented players definitely names you'll recognise include Davor Šuker, Zvonimir Boban and a few more modern ones like Luka Modrić, Vedran Ćorluka and Ivica Olić but the biggest legend of all features on the back of the shirt. :-D

My version of the kit contains all the league sponsors which featured on their most recent kit, this is a sad reflection on how much Croatian football needs to advertise to keep its clubs running especially due to their most talented players being poached early by the bigger foreign clubs which in turn means poor performances in European competition, if they had all the players they had produced still with them then they would definitely be consistently making the group stages of the Champions League or the latter stages of the Europa League. I have used silver instead of white as the secondary colour as it just makes a change and Dinamo have used it before while with umbro and it looked pretty good to me.

The away kit is an orange number, simply because they had an orange away kit last season, other than that their is no real reason. Laziness.

Club Africain (النادي الأفريقي) & FC Atlas

2009-09-06T22:08:00.004+01:00

Hi, I've been away recently so no posts, been at Leeds Festival listening to some music and getting extremely drunk, turns out that drinking heavily for 4 days straight is no good for you go figure? and since then I have been quite ill, but luckily it has just been flu and is going now but still feeling a bit worse for wear so this post will be short.

I've made kits for these two teams as I wanted to venture into Africa with my kits and Club African have quite a recognisable look of red and white hoops. I also wanted to make something Mexican and Atlas de Guadalajara are my favourite team from there so was quite obvious for me to make them.

I'll post more about the design in my next post as I need to throw up, too much information?

Maccabi Tel-Aviv (מכבי תל-אביב) & Omonia Nicosia (Ομόνοια Λευκωσίας)

2009-08-23T13:30:00.005+01:00

Today I bring you what I could call my Mediterranean template as the two teams I have produced with this template both come from this region or more specifically the Eastern Mediterranean. Maccabi Tel-Aviv of Israel and Omonia Nicosia of Cyprus two of the furthest south east outreaches of European football and relatively unknown histories to most Europeans not from the region.

Maccabi Tel-Aviv is one of the oldest sports clubs in Israel, the football part makes up a far larger organization which partakes in a lot of different sports such as Basketball, Volleyball, Swimming and Handball. In fact the basketball section of the organization is one of the most successful teams in Europe. Back to football though, Maccabi (which refers to one of the Maccabees, whose stories have become synonymous with courage, victory and success) have won the most league titles in Israel and as well as this have also won the Asian Champions Cup twice when Israel was once affiliated with the AFC rather than UEFA. Being the most succesful and most supported club in Israel, Maccabi has had some very good players in it ranks that are famous in the rest of Europe such as Eyal Berkovic (אייל ברקוביץ'), Tal Ben-Haim (טל בן-חיים) and John Paintsil, although Berkovic is more recognised as a Maccabi Haifa player, he did infact end his career with the Tel-Aviv club.

I am quite please with the design of the shirt, I intended to make something a bit adidas-y and I think I have achieved it without having to add three stripes. The collar is taken from Liverpool's 06-08 kit, well it is modelled from that and the lines from the collar down the sleeves are reminiscent of last years training kits. Maccabi Tel-Aviv tend to change the design of their kits very often, from stripes to plain yellow to even checkered kits so I thought by adding a blue chest band it would fit in well to that pattern of variation and also add a bit of an individual touch. While making the back of the shirt I didn't intend for it to look like the front of adidas' kits a few years ago but I thought it looked a bit plain so I added those flecks and I think it turned out well. The shorts as you know are not a strong point in design for me and I am not impressed by these, they are very much an after thought. The socks however I am quite pleased with, I tend to be getting better making original sock designs, this one is intended to have a different cut around the calf on the fold over being a more dynamic looking V shape instead of the conventional round style.

For the away kit I have gone for a colour scheme based around the national flag, using the Israeli white and blue colour scheme, it was tough to choose whether or not to add the two blue bars across the front of the chest (like the flag) and I sort of regret doing that now as the shirt is perhaps busy enough as it is. It was also a decision before even designing the template that I wanted the back to be a different colour to the front on the away shirts as I really liked it when Kappa did it for their kits a while back now.

Omonia Nicosia has traditionally been the most successful club in Cypriot football until this year where they were over taken in league titles by city rivals APOEL. During the 70's and 80's, Omonia were the dominant power in Cypriot title race capturing 14 out of 20 league titles in that period, the 90's and 00's have been barren in comparison, with only 3 titles with Anorthosis, APOEL and Apollon all overshadowing them. Although not being a force in European football or even Cypriot football at the present time them have managed to capture one big name player, that being former Wisła Kraków and Celtic striker Maciej Żurawski who has quite a good scoring record at both club and international levels, if they can build on this they are sure to recapture the glory that the 70's and 80's teams enjoyed.

For the kit I thought it pretty important to bring more green into the mix as that is said to represent hope and the team really need more of that so the shorts have been turned green as currently them play in white the shoulders and back are also almost entirely green just being broken up by little bits of white. I was also quite impressed by the look of their kits which had stripes and as I wanted to try these out on this template I obliged with them and think they have turned out pretty well although I did have to modify the back of the template to make them fit. The club crest has also been put inside a traditional shield which I think helps the shirt too, I toyed with just have the shamrock in the crest but it looked too Irish Rugby for my liking.

The away shirt is another play on the national flag, but this I really don't like looking at it now. I got the idea from Kappa's old Vitória Guimarães third kit which was white with a yellow back, but this really doesn't do that justice, maybe it is the black that lets it down, I don't know, I just know I find it hideous to look at now, although the map of Cyprus in the middle of the shirt is a redeeming feature. Oh and APOEL play in yellow...

And Yet More Kappa...

2009-08-22T14:58:00.009+01:00

I think I must have made kits for every Kappa team going at the time, the amount of people that would complain if this was really the case. So nothing to explain here just more different colours of the previous template. There are still a few more but I will post some more original stuff before I post the rest, give you a bit of a respite.

Some More Kappa...

2009-08-21T13:49:00.004+01:00

Just noticed I had never posted these up so here you go, nothing special just a lot of different colour combinations from my 'Kappa' design for teams who played in Kappa at the time of making them.

Don't worry I do have more new designs to show off soon but I'll use these as a gap filler for now.

Dalian Shide (大连实德)

2009-08-20T13:27:00.002+01:00

Sorry for neglecting my blog, I've been a little busy the past week with a little project of my own and also other personal matters which have needed to be sorted out. Hope people have still been looking at all the pretty pictures :D

Dalian Shide are the most successful team in China but have never really been considered big players in Asian continental competitions. They have also been known to produce some of China's most well known players such as Sun Jihai (孙继海) and Dong Fangzhou (董芳卓) who have both spent time in Manchester playing for both City and United respectively.

This kit uses the same style as the Akureyri and Burkinabé kits so not many shocks there, but what is different is that the different stripes which did feature on those two previous kits have been made a different colour from the rest of the kit giving a striking striped look to it but also with a clear central part. I thought that this would work better due to the chinese characters being used for the sponsorship logos, giving a busy look but with a purpose and I think it works pretty well. The logo features 8 stars around the logo which represent their 8 Chinese Premier League wins and also forms part of there nickname.

Nothing much to say about the away kit, just pretty much reversal of colours as is most traditional for the club and ditching the stripes down the sides.

(None of the Chinese characters on the shirt are players names, the one at the top on the back is a sponsor and the one below the number is the teams name.)

Knattspyrnufélag Akureyrar (KA) & Burkina Faso

2009-08-07T17:03:00.005+01:00

So quite a mouthful for the title today, hopefully you will have heard of either of these places but if not I will go into it in a sec. These two sets of kits are both using my newest template that I used for Saint Étienne, hopefully displaying a bit more of the versatility of the templates than was seen with the St. Étienne kits and also some different colours for you to be dazzled by.

So onto out first team, Knattspyrnufélag Akureyrar or as they're better known, KA. They are the second Icelandic team I've made kits for following on from what I have made for KR. I have quite an affinity with Iceland as I kind of went into last time but it's far too long a story to tell here. KA are from the second largest city in Iceland called Akureyri, it's a beautiful little place in the north of the country not many miles outside of the Arctic circle. They're quite a small club with limited success but have won the national league once back in 1989 since then they've struggled to maintain top flight football and currently lie in the country's first division. KA do also have a local rivalry with Þór Akureyri who share the local municipal stadium too as well as competing in the same league. As well as liking the city I also wanted to make kits for quite a small team with a bit of history and success but that no one outside of Iceland had heard of and I think I have chosen the perfect team.

For the home kit I have just used the clubs typical home colours of predominantly yellow with a blue trim. The Icelandic flag features on the back of the shirt above the players name as do the national colours on the socks. The team name also features on the back of the shirt beneath the players number an idea sort of taken from the German Bundesliga, I just think it adds an extra element of identity to the shirts.

The away I have used quite an ususual colour scheme a light slate blue with yellow trim. I chose this colour as it is pretty much the same colour as the skies and the land while I was there so thought it worked well. The yellow is a hangover from the home colours but I realise not it just doesn't work and would have been better off using the blue from the home instead of the yellow.

Now onto Burkina Faso poles apart from Iceland in near enough every aspect. Located in the West of Africa, it is a sub-saharan country and quite a poor one at that. Their football team has also had minimal impact on the world stage never qualifying for a world cup and a best performance of 4th in the African Nations Cup back in 1998. Players of the national team are begininning to penetrate into Europe's top league's now with players such as Jonathan Pitroipa playing in Germany, Charles Kaboré at Olympique Marseille and Yssouf Koné gaining Champions League experience last year with CFR Cluj. Things certainly are looking brighter football wise for the former French colony of Upper Volta as it was formerly known. Currently Burkina Faso are lying in 2nd in their World Cup 2010 group (which also acts as African Nations Cup qualifying) just behind heavyweights Côte d'Ivoire their chances for being at the 2010 World Cup seem pretty slim since being narrowly defeated in Ouagadougou 3-2 by the Ivory Coast, if they can somehow gain a win in the return leg in Abidjan they could yet still be set for a date in South Africa.

For the kit they traditionally play in all green with a red trim and yellow are a tertiary colour following suit with the national flag. I have stripped down the design a bit here to make sure it pretty much all green and striking as most African strips are and hopefully striking enough so that young Burkinabé who see their team play in it will want to follow in their foot steps.

The away I have made all white and personally I prefer this as, yes, it is busier than the home. Accompanying the white are both green and red as well as a dabbing of gold in their for good measure.

A.S. Saint-Étienne Loire (Request)

2009-08-05T12:05:00.004+01:00

A new design today, one I am pretty pleased with for being different but also true to what I like to see a football kit looking like. This kit came as a request from user OKT who also has a blog http://evolution-okt.blogspot.com/ some of the best kits around using a FM texture, very much worth a look if you're into your kit designs.

St. Étienne are the sleeping giant of French football, well OK, there are a few, following Lyon's tremendous run of Ligue 1 titles that it has kind of overshadowed previous acomplishments from other teams in the league. St. Étienne's teams over the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's managed to win a total of 10 Ligue 1 championships and 6 French cups, the most successful domestic French team and is the only one to be able to boast the 10 titles and wear a star above it's crest (although Marseille often does for their Champion's League victory in 1992). Although in recent years the only thing 'Les Vert' has to celebrate is a Ligue 2 victory, which shows just how hard they have fallen from the glory years.

My kit originally set out to honour the victories of previous seasons, where the team wore quite plain looking green shirts with the French tricolor playing a big part by featuring in wrap around collars and also on the shirt cuffs but as I tried this is just didn't anymore and look very dated and also quite weird to see blue, white and red mixed with a dark green so I changed that idea and made something which would feature the flag but not in an over bearing way, so I have just moved it to feature inside the collar and also around the top of the socks.

Now my shirt took on a more modern look, one which I always prefer to make and look at. Featuring the spiky shapes and parts which wrap around the body of the shirt. The collar has been inspired from both adidas and Nike designs, it's not to hard to see which when you think about it. I think it is different enough though to count as being original. Another kit design I have taken a bit of inspiration from albeit unintentionally is Reebok from their design for Liverpool many seasons ago, can't be sure on the exact season though. I say unintentionally because the inspiration actually came from the St. Étienne logo and the stripes there. The intention was to make the darker shade of green into white to mirror the stripes of the logo but in the end I opted out of that idea for a safer option.

For the socks I tried, yes I actually tried something for the socks this time! (sorry about the fragmented English, I thought it worked as a joke) For once I actually think they enhance the look of the rest of the kit wrapping around the back with A.S.S.E. printed there too, imitating the curves of the front of the shirt in the bottom spikes and also the back if you can make that out.

For the away I got a comment about the usage of green shorts taking the overall look of the kit down. Well my again my original intention was to create shorts which would fit in with the home kit to make it all green, but my idiocy made make the details black which would just look hideous mixed with the home shirt and socks. I do however think usage of black here may have been a good idea since their is a high level of green on the shirt to stop it looking boring overall.

SV Werder Bremen

2009-08-04T13:22:00.002+01:00

Today we're going to complete the set of what I started earlier this week and post the rest of what I have done in that poster/presentation style. The team I chose was Werder Bremen of the German Bundesliga as their colour scheme, as corporate the choice of orange is for the team, is one which is pretty unique in terms of football and only Club Atlético Banfield of Argentina have something similar.

With all that talk of orange I decided to totally abandon it in the home kit as it is what most Bremen fans want in their shirt as the campaign on several fan websites to abolish the orange from the shirt. The shirt features a diamond pattern to fit that of the Bremen logo, originally I had the different shade of green in the diamonds as white and was quite pleased with it but upon posting it wasn't greeted as warmly as I thought it might have been so changed it to green. Around the Bremen logo features the dates of the team's four Bundesliga championship victories, the star (which represents three Bundesliga titles each) is located to the left of the logo to be a little different from other teams and also it fits better within the design there than above the logo.

The player is Clemens Fritz.

The away is a bit of a weird concoction but that's usually what Bremen kits are all about aren't they? The main colour of the kit is a dark grey with the shoulders differing between green and orange. This asymmetry continues to the shorts. I personally like it but it was greeted with muted disapproval from other people.

The player is of course Torsten Frings.

Finally, for the third shirt of course it had to be orange. The home features zero, the away about 25% so the third just had to be nearly 100% orange. Their is of course some green to accompany it and white to break it up a wee bit too. For me it is a little too much even though I own an Ivory Coast home shirt with Arouna Koné printing :P

I got a bit bored of changing players so it is Mr. Frings again.

Arsenal F.C.

2009-07-27T14:36:00.005+01:00

I will get down to the requests soon, I have been a little busy with other commitments recently, job and people visiting mainly but I have got a design half baked and I think it works half decently with Saint Etienné but still a long way to go as of yet. Not had many ideas for designs and this one as it stands is just an hours worth of moving shapes around but lets not talk about that for now.

Here's a team which needs no introduction whatsoever, Arsenal F.C. For this I reverted back to the template I used for the Valencia kit which is just ages ago now, I updated it a bit too by drawing in actual finger shapes and changing hair around to represent actual players rather than just a default model.

The kit design itself is the same as Coritiba, Bielefeld and Santander but with this view you can see how it would appear if it was worn as one, of course there have been minor adjustments to it but I feel it still displays the design how I would wish it to look.

I have been asked what is the pattern on the home kit and I am sure I will again if I don't say anything now. It is actually the Fleur-de-lis pattern taken from Arsenal's previous logo, I have searched and searched for it's meaning and purpose in being these but have come up short, but hopefully it is something really interesting :P

The player in question is of course Emmanuel Adebayor (now of Manchester City) but at the time he was pretty much Arsenal's most recognized player from his hair, boots, number and of course his Togolese motifs. I got the idea for this style of presentation, from pictures I saw of Nike's kit launch for Atletico Madrid, with a team name and logo on a wall behind the players and tried to put this in place here.

For the away and third kits I asked people what they think would be best and just used the first two responses I got. I think the third works quite well, been a bit of a mystery why Arsenal have never used a black shirt but thats just the way it has been. I tried to keep quite a good portion of grey on the shirt so it's not too dark and with the symmetrical look it actually appears quite classical with the collar being a thin V. The player here is Theo Walcott but the only thing I could really show was his straight fringe and number 14 logo I guess skin colour helps to recognize him too.

The away (Cesc Fabregas, which actually looks noting like him, the hair is just pish) is a green and dark blue number which was rumoured to be a third or away kit for the new season but never came to fruition, I'm not overly keen on it, I think I could maybe have used a nicer shade of green the compliment the blue but it never came out like that.

Requests?

2009-07-22T00:19:00.002+01:00

If you want me to make a shirt just post a comment and I'll get it done ASAP, I'm running out of teams I actually want to make stuff for so it will help me out to get ideas from other people.

It can be in a previous design if you wish, other wise i will try and do something totally original. If I get bombarded with requests (which I doubt I will) I'll say when requests stop.

Thanks people and get REQUESTING!

COXA!

2009-07-18T14:42:00.003+01:00

Today is the turn of my favourite Brazilian team, the reason they are my favourite team is very loose, it's basically a case of not having a favourite Brazilian team meeting someone who did and adopting them as my own. I must say though I am the worst fan in the world as I always forget to see how they are doing etc. I've been a Coritiba 'fan' for a fair few years now, roughly 5 and as it is their centenary year in 86 days time I decided to try something to commemorate it.

I hope that they're acceptable to all Coritiba fans. I have put as many little details into it as possible, I think you can go two ways with a centenary kit, one to reflect the teams early history by making it as simple and reflective as possible and the other which I have chosen is to keep it with a modern look but throw lots of historical details and other things to make it special to the team.

For the home I have kept the double horizontal chest band but if you look carefully it has the names of the original Coritiba XI printed on it in a faint green colour not trying to be too intrusive. The Coritiba logo is also bigger than I usually like but it is showing the importance of the team so it has to be the centre point of the shirt. On the white mesh detail on the shirt I have repeated the word 'COXA' all around the it, which is the teams nickname. Over the heart of the shirt is the '100 anos' logo from http://www.coxa100anos.com.br/ which is the official logo to celebrate their anniversary. There are also several more details but going into them all would just be boring, as a rundown, odd socks, Paraná state flag... OK so their wasn't that many more.

For the away I wanted to try something different with my very versatile design. So I went with a green away shirt with a sort of sun effect around the Coritiba logo in a darker shade of green. It also has a unique gold side panel on the side and back of the shirt which is the first time I have featured this in the design.

Also got to feature this wonderful piece of work by 'menoia' http://www.menoia.com/2009/06/coritiba-football-clube.html all his works are spectacular as you will see if you check out the rest of his works but I just think this looks awesome and was completed at the same time as my version.

Racing Santander, Arminia Bielefeld

2009-07-16T22:57:00.004+01:00

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.

Thank You

2009-07-15T20:57:00.003+01:00

Just want to say thanks to everyone who is visiting my blog I really do appreciate it when I see all the flags popup on that counter over there >>>>>

As you know I am a bit of a sad bastard and enjoy some odd things, well ok you don't know me that well but it has been known. I am trying to get all the flags possible over on the flag counter and I want to complete Europe first. Thanks to the Bosnian user yesterday I crossed off another country which was nice, but there are still a few more to go. Moldova, Belarus, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Faroe Islands and San Marino. If you know anybody in those countries please can you try and get them to visit here. Or anyother country not accounted for yet. I was shocked to find I had a visitor from Madagascar the the other day and I want to continue those feelings of surprise!

If anyone has ideas how I can entice people from such places please let me know and I'll try my best to do it, maybe make some kits from there is all I can think of :P

Thanks again all.

From Sweden to Italy

2009-07-08T21:04:00.003+01:00

Good day,

Today we start in Sweden then migrate across to Italy, Stockholm to Palermo, north to south, if only it was real life eh?

We start with AIK (Allmänna Idrottsklubben) which is located in Solna which in turn is a district of Stockholm, very interesting I am sure you'll agree. AIK are also considered part of the big three teams in Sweden along with Göteborg and fellow Stockholmers Malmö. They are also one of only a handful of teams to reach the Champions League group stage. I know a handful of football teams, you need pretty big hands.

One of the more interesting things about AIK, for me anyway, is that they are one of only a few teams in the world who wear black as their home colours, for reasons I do not know (it's not on Wikipedia), the only other teams I can think of that use black as their primary home colour is DC United and off course theirs are a more modern creation rather than the history which lays behind AIK's choosing of black. Actually now I have thought about it, and I really did think! Their is also Excelsior Rotterdam, if you know anymore, anywhere in the world please let me know, and it must just be plain black and not black striped with something.

Now onto my creation. I started making this with some inspiration from a Boca Juniors shirt I own, inparticular the shape on the sleeves and the cuffs, the collar is partially drawn from it, but I consider that more my idea, so there. I have also added the style of mesh from 2002 adidas kits which had the double layers with a different colour beneath which I though was awesome. The kit also has some wavy lines on it which is just something I tried out and like which fades out towards the top only to reappear and pass through the logo, possibly more suited to training wear, but my ideas are very sparse so allow me this one. I have also included all the sponsors that were included in their 2008/09 kit just simply because I wanted to highlight it's Swedishness and what better way than a bucket load of sponsors.

The away is exactly the same but in AIK's typical away colour scheme of white-yellow and a black tertiary colour.

Now onto the Italian team in this wee saga, Città di Palermo from the Sicilian region of Italy, never have they won a major title but they are becoming more of a force to be reckoned with in Italy and Europe with respectably high finishes and also atrracting many high profile players. Of course though they are another kit colour anomaly being one of only a few teams in the world to wear pink for their home colour and this time I really can't think of any others. A few have tried it for away kits but never for a home. For me Palermo are one of the most stylish teams in Italy thanks to this garish colour, even though I am not big on wearing pinks, I still think their training wear and casual wear from Lotto has been some of the best around incorporating their eagle motif.

My shirt is pretty much the same as AIK, using the same template, just this has the gradient of the fade reversed so that the chest band is bordered, I did try the chest stripe with gold instead of white but trust me it looked worse. To be honest I don't really think this does the team much justice at all style wise.

The away is just a reversal in black, pink with a gold trim and also with an asymmetrical style. I actually think this works quite well, with the colours fitting a lot better and the asymmetrical design owing a lot to the aestethic value.

Wigan Athletic and Girondins de Bordeaux

2009-07-07T23:03:00.006+01:00

Today we have the same designs as last time, boring I know but just thought you should see these too, nothing overly special.

Wigan as a town is really close to me, geographically that it, actually I'm pretty lucky to live in a place where 8 teams of the best league in the world are all located within about an hours drive from me. If Preston and Blackpool can win promotion next season I'll be properly set for my footballing needs, Blackpool especially only being down the road, but that is a huge ask for them.

Wigan's is a pretty well known story, rapid rise up through the football league, they played in the same league as my town, which isn't that impressive any more as they (Fleetwood) have had a very rapid promotions of their own. At one point though it was the 9th level in English football. They are also from a very staunch rugby town which means they have had to fight for their share of fans as well as from the high population of other top flight football teams. Now they're quickly becoming an established team themselves with a garnish of foreign talent as well as northern grit with players such as Antonio Valencia and Jimmy Bullard making their names there.

For their kit, well I won't lie to you it is pretty much just Porto, only without the stripes on the sleeves. One crucial thing I have changed though is I have got rid of their nasty gold which they seem to have adopted and taken them back to the days when they had a green trim which was far more unique I thought and also fits in well with the tree in their new logo.

For the away kit I made it a bright orange as i have been told they're due to be getting an orange kit for the 2009/10 season, but don't tell anyone I said so. I think this colour scheme shows off the straight-ish lines and sharp edges I was going for pretty well too.

Now on to Bordeaux, champions of France and what seemed to be the perennial runners-up in French football for many seasons. They are of course famous for producing Zinedine Zidane, wine, neolithic fossils and of course their shirts emblazioned with a V for reasons I don't actually now. I actually am a fan of Puma's new kit with the white shoulders, I know Bordeaux traditionalists will probably be unhappy with it, but somethings it's good to try new things and build new traditions.

But that's not what I have done here. The design was actually made around Bordeaux so it would fit them well, with a V fold collar and also a lesser noticable V with the white side panels descending into a lesser V.

For the away I took a little inspiration from Puma's kit and left the shoulders Bordeaux blue, and made the main body of the kit burgundy red like past away kits and representing the famous wine the region produces.

A Portuguese Twist

2009-07-06T12:00:00.003+01:00

Well OK not exactly, but both countries these clubs represent speak Portuguese so the title does work on that level. Yes of course I am talking about Brazil and Portugal or more specifically FC Porto and São Paulo FC.

FC Porto 2 time Champions League winners, 24 Portuguese league and 18 cup titles to their name, are one of the most successful teams in European football and I'm now proud to announce they have signed with the Infinite brand, yeah, I wish, but I am building quite a number of teams I have produced kits for under the brand now and still there will be more to come, but back to FC Porto. They don't need too much of an introduction with their international credentials and international force of players, present and past.

For their kit I produced something in the traditional blue and white stripes of the team and the more modern touch of an orange trim brought in by Nike as a tertiary colour. The design is a new one which just came to me, I've had thoughts about something which pretty much just uses straight lines and a big chunk of mesh behind the logo, so this is what happened. Even though the shoulders and plain blue the sleeves still have a hint of Porto's stripes. All the rest is pretty self explanatory, stylized Porto dragon at the bottom of the back of the shirt, Quinas in the centre of the chest, all sponsor and league logos included.

I've also started making away shirts again, so here is Porto's. I've gone for a striking orange away with the hint of stripes a bit like what they had with their Nike T90 away shirt, their is also a blue and white trim featureing all the logos that are on the home.

Now we have São Paulo FC, one of the most succesful Brazilian clubs nationally and internationally, a team with great tradition in their football kits, always (as far as I know) featuring the tricolor of red-white-black band across their chests. so this is what I have applied here. a large São Paulo logo has been placed on the tricolor area with the 5 stars, three red for their Copa Libertadores sucesses and the other two for the Olympic success of an athlete who also represented São Paulo. On the sleeves is a feature of the tricolor again, red stripes on the left sleeve black on the right, both with white as the seperator. On the sleeve is the 'O PRIMEIRO E ÚNICO TRI-HEXACAMPEÃO BRASILEIRO' symbol, which, I believe is a statement that they are the only Brazilian team to win three Copa Libertadores titles.

The away kit also features São Paulo's tricolor only with more on an emphasis on the red and black on the kit in striped form another kit which is steeped in history and tradition with São Paulo.

Hrvatska & NEC Nijmegen

2009-07-03T20:21:00.004+01:00

I've done it again haven't I? Taken a while to post something new that is, I do have my reasons though, been swamped with work recently so not even been able to manage some middle of the day browsing of websites as you do when you get tired the tediousness of work.

Well today I have Croatian kits or more specifically those of the national team. Also I have kits of NEC Nijmegen to show.

First we'll start off with the Croatia kits, I'm sure you all know who they are or you wouldn't of found this page otherwise. It uses the exact same design as I used for Beşiktaş so I don't even need to explain that! My job here just gets easier and easier. Not really mush to explain anyway just red and white checks with a blue and gold trim in places. The away is pretty much typical Croatia too, I did start off trying to make an away Croatia kit with out using blue but I found this really hard to do making it both aesthetically pleasing and also representative of Croatia. So in the end I just reverted back to a blue kit, I'm a coward.

Oh by the way, it has been pointed out to me previously I have used the wrong diacritic above the 'c' in Modrić that'll teach me to write Croatian names without checking first.

Now I got a few complaints about the home kit that it was a bit too much of an eyesore with almost totally checkered design so I came up with this, which is inspired from Lotto's 98 Croatia design which I thought was great being mainly white.

Now time for Nijmegen Eendracht Combinatie or NEC as they're more oftenly called, so by calling them NEC Nijmegen I have made a bit of a fool of myself, oh well shit happens. They have one of the more unique coloured home kits in world football which makes them a prime target for me as I like the uniqueness. The design itself you may recognize if you have looked further back in my blog, as it is actually taken and adapted from the 'Kappa' design. I've kept it pretty traditional to the team, with the red and green halves, I have also continued onto this sleeves, I don't have much of a memory of NEC kits but I think this is unique (have I said that enough already?). On the back of the shirt is the crest of Nijmegen just as a nice uniq... individual feature.

More?

2009-06-28T14:16:00.005+01:00

Seeing as though I didn't post in a while thought it might be a good idea to have two posts in one day! Who would have thought eh?

Well what can I bring you, well I have this design which I just made up playing around with shirt styles, I never made any shorts or socks because they were starting to become quite unimaginative so I kept to the shirt only for the model.

First up we have Beşiktaş J.K. current Turkish champions, and I haven't ventured into Turkish football yet so I thought they'd make an ideal model for the design.

I also realised that none of my striped kits had any stripes on the sleeves, not that I am allergic to them or anything just I never think to add them, so that is something I got to straight away. The bottom white line is a kind of deviant of the 2002 Nike design which had a line of different colour wrap around the back and stop on the front so I incorporated that and turned it into a more energizing shape almost giving the appearance of bull horns. The collar is a plain V-neck which I have used before on some other design I made but have added a couple of lines to add a bit of red into the design as a plain black and white kit would be so boring, I also think it gives a classy not over complicated look.

I have place a decorated Turkish emblem on the left of the chest to signify them winning the league title and the word 'SAMPIYON' (Champion) underneath, with Beşiktaş' two stars above symbolizing the former league victories.

As an after thought to make the kit more unique and special I decided to make a stylized version of Beşiktaş' İnönü Stadium as it is the last year they will play there before they move to their new modern stadium, on the stands are wrote 'Stadyumu İnönü' and on the other side it says 'Kara Kartallar' which is the team's nickname and means Black Eagles in English. The stars over the stadium represent the 11 players on the pitch with a special large on in the middle with a 12 of course denoting the fans as the 12th man. The pitch contains the clubs initials BJK in an ornamented fashion with the founding date of 1903 in the stand under the large star.

Hamburger SV und FK Baku

2009-06-28T12:31:00.006+01:00

Again not really updated this in a while so apologies for that, just been busy/lazy, well, it makes sense in my head! I am pleased to say I have come up with a few more designs though so I've not been all that lazy after all.

Today I bring you the kits of Hamburg SV (HSV) and FK Baku (FK Baku), funny no?

These are both in the same style as my previous Győri kit so they both have the wacky sleeve design, and big central graphics and all the other pizazz that you saw in it.

HSV are a club that doesn't require an introduction, one of the biggest teams in Germany and one of the only teams to never have been relegated from the Bundesliga. They haven't had the same success in recent times as they did have in the early 80's but they have been a big hitter usually finishing their seasons among the top 5.

As I mentioned in my St. Pauli article Hamburg is one of the nicest cities I have ever been to and a few years ago I got to see HSV play at what was the AOL Arena (now HSH Nordbank Arena, just doesn't have the same ring to it) against Schalke who won 0-1 and then went on to win the league, I do have fond memories of it and it was around the time that Juan Pablo Sorín had joined the club as I still have the programme with his big face on it so from a time I considered them to have their strongest squad in a long time, note the word squad and not team.

What I have done here for the shirt is try and take it back to having a predominantly blue trim since they've had a red trim last season and a blue trim before that so I thought it time to hope back to blue but I have kept a good deal of red in it with the logos and numbers, the graphic on the front is the castle from the Hamburg coat of arms and the rest of the shirt is pretty self explanatory.

Both the shorts and socks are traditional HSV with the Rothosen and blue socks with their typical black and white stripes around the top, never been sure why that is the tradition though, but it is there.

FK Baku are a team I must admit again I don't know much about other than they're the current champions of the Azerbaijani league so will be playing Champions League football next season and are located in the capital Baku. From looking through some older pictures I noted they have played in hoops before so I thought that could be something to revert to as the stripes looked a little dull and this gives the shirt some character although it has ended up looking like a bit of a Reading kit. On the back of the kit their is an insignia from an older crest of the team showing an oil derrick which I believe is one of the main industries in Baku and Azerbaijan. The graphic on the chest comes from the teams current logo and gives it a unique look if nothing else, yeah, ok, it does look a bit odd (shit).

The socks for this turned out well I think I used the serrated style which can be seen around the rim for the hoops and I think it gives a nice feel to it.

Győri ETO FC

2009-06-19T14:03:00.003+01:00

Another day, another kit, today is turn of Hungarian Soproni Liga side Győri ETO FC from the city of Győr in the north of Hungary, a pleasant town in the north of Hungary of which I have had the pleasure to travel through.

I can't say I know much more than that about this team without consulting Wikipedia and even that doesn't give me a great deal more information other than they have won three national league titles one being in 1963 which coincided with a good run in the European cup the following season getting all the way to the semi-finals before being dumped out by Eusébio's Benfica side 5-0 on aggregate.

One reason I like Győri is that I consider their logo to be one of the nicest looking in world football, the colour combination of a dark bluey-green and white with gold trim makes it stand out for a start. Then the presentation of the information is quite classic being almost completely round with an inner section displaying a cockeral upon it's perch (not quite sure what that represents) and the presentation of the clubs colours on the opposite side of the crest. Then their is the fantastic Hungarian text around it which just looks like no other language on Earth top off this wonderful logo.

After a little bit of extra research into the history with regards to the teams shirts and kits, this led me to know I had to create something all green with a good splashing of white too. I took my inspiration for this design from Orlando Magic's jersey (I was watching the NBA playoffs at the itme of designing it) and that's where the lines on the sides of the shirt come from. You may also notice the unusual cut of the gold line on the back and shorts, this is corresponding with how the Magic setout their shirt too giving it an intersecting look.

You will also see quite an unusual pattern on the sleeves of the shirt, again I drew inspiration from another shirt for this. I originally set-out to create a shirt with the feel of a 98 kappa design and inparticular the kappa Red Star Belgrade shirt, I played for about half an hour trying to get something similar with different colours but always failing. Eventually I decided to make it into a kind of water mark using different chades of green but still it didn't look right in the centre of the shirt so I tried it on the sleeve et voilà, the pattern was born.

The socks I am also quite proud of this time around, I have given the top trim of the socks a serated edge with a gold trim around the top and a small logo of the crest stiched on the front of the socks a bit like Adidas did a few years ago (Anyone else getting the impression this shirt is a major rip-off? haha).

I needed to use the cockeral on the front of the shirt I thought it made a cool central feature of the shirt and broke up the big area of plain green. An earlier version of the logo also features on the back of the collar. Hopefully the kit looks just as nice as the logo.

Maribor + Litex Lovech

2009-06-18T12:21:00.005+01:00

Two different teams today, using the same template as the previous Bohemians 1905, so I won't be jabbering on too much about that.

Why have I picked these two teams? Well I actually have a list of all the teams I want to create something for then I just randomly pick a number between 1 and 20 then create those teams, that's what I usually do anyway, and I did this time to a degree. I picked Maribor a bit more manually because I thought the purple and yellow colours would perfectly compliment the template. Litex was picked the random way from my list.

Maribor are the most well supported team in Slovenia, unfortunately for me I have only passed through their on my way to Ljubljana but I was tempted to jump off and see if I could find a shirt. Maribor are also the most succesful club in Slovenian football and have won the league championship this season too mean that they will have Champions League football next season. The are also the only Slovenian team to have qualified for the Champions League group stage back in the year 2000 sharing the group with Lazio, Bayer Leverkusen and Dynamo Kiev.

I've always been a fan of Maribor kits ever since I first saw them in pictures about 8 years ago. Then when they got a Nike T90 kit I knew I just had to have one, but as you'd guess Slovenian kits are quite rare in the U.K. and I'm still waiting to get my hands on one now. So I just did the next best thing at the time and created them in FIFA. It's a kit I'm still pretty pleased with until this day as I had to create all but one or two of the sponsor logos and it is a large amount of sponsors.

For my version, which I actually created before Bohemians, I greatly cut down on the sponsor logos as I wasn't going for accuracy like I was for my FIFA version, so I have just left their main sponsor, 'Zavarovalnica Maribor'. The logo has also been modified from the crest you see in the centre of the presentation to just the city crest which you see on the shirt. As I'm not a great fan of the name above the logo, always thought it looks a bit poor like nothing else representative can be found to place in that location of the logo.

Litex Lovech I don't really know to much about at all, I just know that they used to have a pretty nice kit by Adidas a few years ago which they played against Middlesbrough with back in 2006, it was orange with a diagonal black gradient which is what I have attempted here, not quite sure if it works though. I saw their game against Aston Villa where they wore another Adidas shirt with a singular white shoulder which I thought was alright, but it wasn't a touch on the 2006 kit. The player on the back is former Charlton Athletic defender Radostin Kishishev, 'Радостин Кишишев'.

Some more Nike...

2009-06-16T00:22:00.006+01:00

I got an email the other day just asking if I could post more of my Nike kits that I posted way back in March so I am happy to oblige. Plus I've not posted in a bit of time so this will make up for it a little.

Something different...

2009-06-10T23:13:00.004+01:00

Just thought I'd make a change today and show you some of my early work with FIFA. These are so unbelievably ugly so please avert your eyes if you're of a delicate disposition.

To be precise I actually made them for a game called Total Club Manager 2004 which used the same graphics engine as FIFA. The lines and everything aren't so bad it is just the collars which let these kits down severely oh and the logos haven't been resized properly at all, look at the dinner plate logos on that Sweden kit! Also note that I think the Portugal kit was the first time I discovered how to use the screen blending mode in Photoshop for the first time, hence why it looks really shiny.

Aaaah the good old days, how I feel nostalgic.

Bohemians 1905 (Prague)

2009-06-08T23:05:00.003+01:00

Now for another sob story, well ok not so much a sob story but more a semi-sob story. Today's protagonists are Bohemians 1905, a team based in Vršovice, Praha 10 administrative district of Prague, and is another place I am really fond of. Having visited there quite a few times, , but never have I seen a Czech match! One day I will see a game though, hopefully a Bohemians 1905 game!

Bohemians are affectionately nicknamed 'Klokani', or Kangaroos in Czech, after a tour of Australia they were famously given a kangaroo to commerate the trip to take back to Prague zoo and it has stuck ever since and has notoriously become the clubs logo. Bohemians 1905 are not to be confused with Bohemians Praha another Czech team who until this season were above Bohemians 1905 in terms of leagues but now the more famous of the two, 1905, have gained promotion back to the Gambrinus liga.

This is where the semi-sob story comes in... The club who as the name suggest have over 100 years worth of history but in their centenary year of 2005 they were struck with a massive financial crisis due to poor management of the club, this forced to demote the team to the 3rd division of Czech football and briefly became known as AFK Vršovice due to not being able to pay the licence fee too the league, during this time another Prague team, FC Střížkov, bought the license and continued to play under the name Bohemians Praha which could never be retrieved for the true Bohemians who had to settle for Bohemians 1905. Got that all?

Their fans are known for being some of the most loyal in the Czech Republic as when the club faced this economic crisis their fans setup a cooperative trust collection between themselves and managed to raise a very impressive 3,800,000 CZK, 2,800,000€ at the time, and managed to clear the debt.

Today the club have just regained promotion to the Gambrius liga and look set to duel with Bohemians Praha, which will surely be two of the biggest games of the season for them, possibly overtaking the rivalry which once stirred between them and fellow fallen giants Dukla Praha.

For this kit I took a bit of inspiration from Canterbury's kits for both football and rugby, having their seems seemingly dotted all over the place in near random positioning but still managing to look very nice and very impressive. I was also looking to create something quite dynamic looking, my first try I created something too ugly for words so I went back to the drawing board and simplified it down to what you see now. The white and green patches down the side of the kit are intended to give a kind streamlined effect. I toyed with making these patches continue in an arcing shape down the back of the shirt but didn't turn out well so I opted more for a semi-chevron look. Lots of semis going on isn't there.

For with the shirt sponsor I again didn't want to pollute the shirt with a bawdy looking corporate logo so I dedicated this space to the incredible Bohemians fans and added a simple bit of text, Klokani, with the kangaroo logo incorporated into the 'O' of the writing.

The shorts follow this style, almost. here I actually did think to follow down looked better but perhaps you disagree that this just looks wrong because it doesn't follow the same style as the shirt, but I am quite happy with it.

Peñarol & Busan I'Park (아이파크)

2009-06-06T23:09:00.005+01:00

A totally non-European affair today. We've got teams hailing from Uruguay and South Korea respectively. I can't think of any connections between the two whatsoever but now the two have come together under my 'Infinite' brand!

Yeah it is tenuous but that's all I have to work with....

Well Peñarol are the Uruguayan team in this instance if you hadn't guessed. Peñarol are one of the biggest teams in Uruguay and also historically one of the most successful teams not only nationally but also internationally, claiming fourty-six league titles and five, yes five, Copa Libertadores titles. As well as this they also have a fierce rivalry with captial city rivals Nacional, a rivalry so fierce than the opposite teams sponsors have majorly suffered business wise from being boycoted as was the case with Pepsi when they were the main sponsors of Nacional, fighting the Cola wars even in football.

For the shirts I have opted for a checked shirt in the teams famous yellow and black colours, not a totally original move as Peñarol have worn a checkered pattern before in their history, way back in 1901 Wikipedia tells me. So I thought it was high time that they made a reappearance. I have used the slightest amount of white on the shirt but have been told by one person that this would cause a reprisal in the Peñarol camp and by another that this amount would be tolerated so I really don't know who to believe. The crest has been 'double-badged' to highlight its location or it would just fade into the background with the checks. On the back of the shirt their is a large black panel for the name and number to be seen visibly too. I had toyed with the idea of using a black crest on the back for the name and number to be placed in but it just look really dated. The Uruguayan flag also is located on the back of the shirt for some national pride.

Busan I'Park (아이파크) which you may have guessed by the Korean text is in fact the Korean team we are discussing today. I really know next to nothing about them other than the team colours and have enjoyed seeing the evolution of their strips ever since their kappa strip from 2004. Their colours are truly unique and I can't think of any other team that uses red and white quarters in the world, if you can let me know!

The most recent Busan kit has done away with all black from the shirt which I personally am not a fan of so I have given it another run out with black sleeves and a black collar. The shirt features the red and white quarters with the Busan I'Park crest centred in nearly the middle of the shirt with two largish stars either side of it, which represent their four K-League victories. Beneath the crest is the typical Busan I'Park text which is featured in both Latin and Korean alphabets.

On the back of the shirt is Korean international and the club's top scorer Jeong Shung-Hoon (정성훈)

Knattspyrnufélag Reykjavíkur (KR)

2009-06-04T16:51:00.008+01:00

Now to Iceland! A country I have a bit of history with, but that is a pretty long story to say the least.

On my travels to Iceland I had the chance to watch this match live at the KR-völlur, now you must surely be thinking, that's got to be the dullest thing ever, well I can tell you it really wasn't. The fans were far better than I had expected, all of them were on their feet beating drums chanting for their team, I even joined in a few 'Kow-Air' (as it pronounced in Icelandic) chants! The match was good too, it was between KR - HK (Handknattleiksfélag Kópavogs) who have now been relegated to the 1. delid karla. The match ended 3-2 to KR and their was much jubilation around the stadium, which is more one stand at the side of the pitch than anything else. A small report on the match can be found here: http://www.soccerway.com/matches/2007/09/16/iceland/landsbankadeild-karla/knattspyrnufelagid-reykjavik/handknattleiksfelag-kopavogs/442641/ an if memory serves me right Takefusa's goal was a spectacular bar down and in so it was well worth my while going. Only regret is not buying a scarf, I have contacted the club but they never get back to me :(

Above is a bit of my 'excellent' photography I took from the match :D

KR is officially the most successful club in Iceland although they've not won a national title since 2003 they have been an ever present threat in the league and because they are the most successful team they wear gold with their traditional black and white. They are more well known for wearing stripes, but I tried this and I just didn't feel it looked good enough for them to hypothetically wear, so I limited it to a singular black stripe down the centre with black sleeves giving the illusion that the stripes were bigger than they actually are. I also opted to make the KR crest a tad larger than usual to boast the teams identity and show the opponent just who they are. The collar is a stylish and semi-modern design which gives the impression that it is cutting through the shirt. The crest of Reykjavík is feature on the back of the collar just above the gold writing in a business like times new roman font.

The shorts and socks are both black and feature white and gold trims with the socks differing with text 'Knattspyrnufélag' down the left sock and 'Reykjavíkur' down the right sock.

Competition!

2009-06-02T18:49:00.004+01:00

Hi,

Just want to let you know that over at DesignFootball.com their is going to be a competition taking place in the next few days to see who can design the best Sevilla home kit! Their will also be a grand prize for the winner, but I can't let you know what that is yet though, it is a good one though.

Your truly is going to be the judge so I can't win it unfortunately, so bad times. However it is open to everyone else, happy times! I am going to be looking for the most meaningful, most well designed and best presented kit, well they are what I am going to look for most and it's got to have a wow factor too.

To check out the rules and regulations for the competition check out this page http://www.designfootball.com/football-shirt-design/119-which-team-for-first-unofficial-df-competition

Hope to see you competing!!!

FK Vojvodina, FK Mladá Boleslav

2009-06-01T13:14:00.005+01:00

Well I don't know about you, but I really can't say I know a lot about these teams. I have never been to either place either although I do hear Vojvodina is meant to be pretty nice, maybe I'll get to go one day.

You may have seen a pattern develop with the kits in the past few posts, basically places I've been and seen, but now I just decided to totally stray off of my beaten track and try some teams which are seen in their own countries as being forever the perennial under achievers hovering in mid-table nothingness. Although this season has been slightly different for Vojvodina who are looking to take down the Belgrade monopoly of the league and have been working their way towards a second place finish behind Partizan. Currently with a game to go they are two points ahead of Red Star and a win in their next game will secure a third qualifying berth in the new Europa League.

Mladá Boleslav however have lived up to their own label of being a decent team in the Czech league but not a brilliant team. With a sixth place finish, must be said on the Czech head-to-head rule, they have missed out on any European competition whatsoever. With a second place finish in 2006 behind surprise winners Slovan Liberec, it has been hard to replicate such success in recent years. They are not a team of big names and never really have been although you may recognize the name Michal Papadopulos from the Czech national team who made his international debut again England.

For the kits I have kept them pretty traditional but using the same template as the previous Ferencváros kit. Colours have all been kept the same and to a degree so has the styles.

Vojvodina are best known for playing in red and white halves and I was happy to oblige this, also adding in a tertiary accent colour of gold which can be seen as a prominent colour on the clubs logo. I had the choice of the gold or the blue of the star and thought that the blue was a little too full on to use on a wider scale of the shirt. All of the rest of the design pretty much follows the same as the previous kit you have seen in this design. The blue star does however feature on the back of the socks.

For Mladá Boleslav I have tried something a little different but nothing radical. The team usually plays in an all white shirt with a light blue secondary colour in just parts of the shirt but I have changed this so just the sleeves feature the blue. The rest of the design is made up of mesh which still gives a visible look but nothing full on, such as a change of colour would bring. The team are sponsored by that very recognisalbe Czech brand Škoda so just for the sake of making it look as Czech as possible and also I think it has become a recognisable feature of the Mladá Boleslav shirts that I couldn't not add it.

Ferencváros

2009-05-30T12:49:00.002+01:00

Greetings yet again,

After yesterday's story about Timişoara's injustice, I'm starting to feel a bit Shakespearian as I am about to tell you yet another story of woe. This one including Ferencváros, or Fradi as is their nickname, from the Hungarian capital Budapest.

Long have they been known as Hungary's most successful football team, claiming 28 league titles, 20 cup titles and numerous other domestic awards as well as being the only team in the country to hold a European title thanks to their 1965 victory in the UEFA Inter-City Fairs Cup, the precursor to the UEFA Cup.

However due to financial troubles in the 2006 the club, for the first time in its history, was demoted from the first division. This was challenged by the club over the legality of this move by the Hungarian FA and the team won, and an out-of-court settlement was reached. Now three years on Fradi has finally managed promotion back to the top Hungarian league, Soproni Liga and hoping to contest for the title yet again with the help and financial backing of Sheffield United owner Kevin McCabe, constructing a brand new stadium, aswell as farming out young prospects to the team. The future is certainly looking a lot brighter for Ferencváros now.

Now down to the kit. I wanted to create something commemorative of Fradi's return to top flight football, so I created a motif logo instead of a sponsor, reading "FRADI VISSZA TÉRTÜNK!" which translates as "Ferencváros We Are Back!". I also added a green eagle landing to represent the touching down of the team back into the division, the green eagle is a very well known symbol of the team and used by many fan groups.

Fradi are quite well known for traditionally sporting green and white stripes but I wanted to break with the tradition a little to reflect this new start, so I added a large vertical white stripe down the centre of the kit with smaller stripes either side of it, I also made these lines curved as it looked more aesthetically pleasing to me. From reading earlier posts you may know I am quite fond of North American sports and this has influenced me slightly here. The collar and green horizontal stripe beneath are partly inspired from ice hockey uniforms, the socks are also inspired from that. The back of the shirt is divided between the name and number an idea again inspired from Nike's T90 range and a Fradi shirt I own! Although I have incorporated it slightly differently to their interpretation.

FC (Politechnica) Timişoara, FK Makedonija

2009-05-29T19:27:00.005+01:00

Evening all,

I thought I'd lump these two teams in together as they do share some qualities in a design manner, I've pretty much given them the same as my previous Terek kit. Of course their are slight differences but we'll get to those.

I'll start with a quick message about FC Timişoara, a team from a city of the same name in the west of Romania, a beautiful place which I have had the pleasure of visiting. The football team is probably the most well supported in Romania outside of Bucharest of course. Until recently they were known as FC Politechnica Timişoara and prided themselves for playing in all purple, but due to a court ruling they had to drop the Politechnica part of their name, change the club colours from purple and also the team logo had to be changed. This was because all this was owned by a businessman who owned another team in the Romanian fourth division situated just outside of Bucharest. This ruling caused outrage in Timişoara that they had been robbed of their identity and promptly arranged for thousands of fans to march upon the city centre.

So as you can tell I had a bit of motivation to make something and give back a very small part of their identity if you want to learn more you can check out this webpage http://www.justiceforpoli.com.

FK Makedonija Gjorče Petrov to give them their full name are the current champions of Macedonia, and that's pretty much where my knowledge ends of them unfortunately. Little research however tells me that they're based in the captial Skopje, a place I've not been but would like to eventually. It is also the first time in the club's history that they have won the national title. The first part of the name obviously comes from the native latinized term for Macedonia, the Gjorče Petrov part of the name however comes from an important revolutionary figure in the formation of the Republic of Macedonia.

For Timişoara I obviously was going to restore the famous purple and bring back their previous logo, one of the prettiest looking in football in my opinon. The shirt uses the same collar as Terek but I have switched the focus on the colours so the previously 'missing' part can be seen. The other spike from the logo over the shoulder to the back remains however to give a visible design feature. I have added semi-visible stripes to the front also with the knight insignia of the logo worked in too, to give it a very personal Timişoara touch. The shorts are again pretty plain as are the socks just adding some tradional colours to the mix aswell as a dark double striped highlight on the shorts. Oh and the back of the collar, above the player name contains the city emblem and a logo reading 'Timişoara 1921'.

FK Makedonija uses a very obvious design feature, as the team is named after the country and has a revolutionary leader in its name I thought it only fitting to work the national flag into the shirt which isn't a stray from tradion, the team actually use red and yellow stripes normally. The infinite logo has been worked into the flag design to follow the stripe of the sun. I have made adequate room on the back for name and number, with a lion carefully selected from the teams previous logo above.Half of the front designs has been removed as to not conflict with the lines of the sun and I think the other still remaining half really suits the design.

Terek Grozny

2009-05-28T16:08:00.004+01:00

Hello, what team do we have today? Aaah yes, Terek Grozny of the Russian Premier League, a league which I have a bit of a love affair with, well I have a great admiration for all Slavic countries but Russia is one I especially love, so you're bound to see a lot more stuff from there in the future posted on here.

Terek Grozny are a team from the Chechnya region of Russia in the south, bordering Georgia and other semi-autonomous republics such as Dagestan and Ingushetia of which I am sure you have heard of on the news due to the war and violence that has gone on there. Until only this season has the team returned to play in Grozny, the capital of the region, before they played in Pyatigorsk, Stavropol Krai.

Due to this I wanted to create something nice for a team and a region that deserve more than just being known for war.

Terek traditionally play in all green, a prominent colour in Chechnya as it is the main colour of the Chechen flag. I wanted to give the shirt a bit of regional pride so I threw caution to the wind and added some red which also features upon the flag. I know, I know, "red and green should never be seen..." but hopefully the amount of red is quite minute and not hugely noticable.

Since my last kit, Dynamo Kiev, was quite retro looking, I decided I wanted a return to my more preferred modern look to shirts so I have ditched the symetrical look which seems to usually give shirts a much more modern feel. I also made sure it had some shape angles which can be seen with the spikes on the back.

The collar was sort of inspired by an old umbro Everton (spits) shirt, the collar looked like it had a piece missing and I thought that looked really cool so wanted to try something similar.

The shorts and socks are very unimaginative, even I think so, I really lost my inspiration there just couldn't think of anything.

I have also added a little personal touch with Chechen writing around the collar, I can't exactly remember what it means now, but I am sure it says something quite inspirational!!!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, I can't say I am a huge fan of it though.

Dynamo Kiev

2009-05-22T23:17:00.004+01:00

As previously post I wanted to make something for Dynamo Kiev but was a bit fed up with the Adidas look so tried doing something of my own with my own Infinite brand.

Now as you may have noticed I am not the biggest fan of the classical look in kits but I want to see if I could change this in myself and create something relatively 'classic' looking. First place of course to give that look is the collar and I just thought that your typical fold collar was a bit too cliché and has been done many times before, now I know my take isn't totally original but it is quite rarely done.

Second place I thought to invest my time in was the sleeves and to give the cuffs, like the collar a relatively big cut, well I think it is quite bit, I do tend to prefer cuffs to be really small, even non-existent.

One more theme running through the kit is the Ukrainian flag, as you'll see I have used quite a lot more yellow than is traditionally seen in Dynamo's past kits. The cuffs are blue-yellow (zhovto-blakytni), the collar has blue-yellow, the sash has a small element of blue-yellow all tending on replicating the national flag and instilling some pride in the nation and to highlight the teams history as being the nations most succesful and most well known team.

I've brought back the sash as I am not a huge fan of the current pinstripe look, although the template I do really like. Throughout the teams history I think one thing they are recognized for the world over is their blue diagonal stripe even though most years they have played without it.

Another nationalistic symbol on the back of the collar is the country's coat of arms althought in an inverted colour scheme to reflect well on the kit.

A little thing you may see in the background of the image is some text, this is a theme I am going to run with for the presentation for all my kits with my new branding. It is just text of the clubs history in the national language as I think it is a nice little touch.

The player on the back of the shirt is Artem Milevskiy/Артем Мілевський

Perspective Infinite

2009-05-22T23:09:00.002+01:00

Well hello people today I am going to introduce you to something new, my own brand! Huzzah!

It is totally slapdash and was just a last minute after thought when I couldn't be bothered to make another Adidas template but still wanted to create something for Dynamo Kiev so I rushed the logo, the name pretty much everything but I was relatively happy with it, so I am now going to be trying to create a few original templates and I do have a few team names lined up so watch this space.

If you've not guess the brand name is "Perspective Infinite", it is totally meaningless!

St. Pauli

2009-05-18T22:07:00.003+01:00

Hello! I see you're back for another instalment of my kits. Well I hope I won't disappoint. Today I have F.C. St. Pauli of Hamburg. The following season is their centenary year, something I was reminded about by MW FROM WIDEOPEN over on the Footballshirtculture fantasy kit board.

Seeing his version of the St. Pauli centenary shirt really inspired me to create something of my own. St. Pauli is a team which is quite close to me, I have been to Hamburg numerous times, it's a glorious city with lots going on there and I have always admire St. Pauli and of course the Reeperbahn ;-).

If you're wondering why I am banging on a lot about a 2. Bundesliga team so much, then I think it is time for a little bit of educating and if you don't you may aswell skip forward to the next paragraph. St. Pauli isn't an overly illustrious club, but what St. Pauli is, is an institution, a way of life for some people, to be different is to be St. Pauli or what is now defined as 'Kult'. St. Pauli is located near Hamburg's infamous red light district 'Reeperbahn' and from this nightlife evolved an alternate fanscene which the club was quick to adopt officialy. Soon after the skull and crossbones (Deutsch: Totenkopf) was adopted by the supporters as a symbol an unoffical symbol which can be seen all around their Millerntor stadium. One of the most important moves the club made was to ban all right-wing, nationalist activities at the stadium this has led to the many conflicts with opposing neo-nazi fan groups especailly at away games. As you can see St. Pauli isn't just like anyother club, they are the antithesis to most modern clubs especially fan base wise where their 20,000 stadium regularly sells out even whilst in the Regionalliga Nord. St. Pauli also boasts the biggest female following in the league and many other punks and skinheads, people who would be otherwise regarded as different in society regularly attend matches.

Well now that rant is over, it is down to the kit. For a 100 year celebration I really wanted to make some special and something that stands out for the right reasons. As you can guess St. Pauli's kit history is very checkered, it includes such kits as a brown camouflage kit, an all back with cow print and stenciled metal font. The majority of kits include brown so that was an obvious choice for me. The club also employs a good deal of red in their logo so I thought it would be wise to throw that in, aswell as being in quite famous (around the stadium anyway) flags. Another colour which is incorporated largely in the logo and flags is white. So that gave me my pallete to work with, brown-red-white, doesn't exactly sound the special but I tried to use it to my best effect and of course it would be unique.

One thing I knew I needed to have on the shirt is the skull and crossbones design and rather than just add one I added a load to the red band around the stomach which you can just about make out if you look carefully, their must be about 20 or something all in different sizes. To make the shirt stand out I decided to try something I can't remember seeing on anyother shirt, and that is to divide it horizontally into three colour sections, white shoulders and chest, red band around the middle as previously noted and brown as the bottom selection to blend into the rest of the brown of the kit.

One thing I am really pleased with is the font on the back of the shirt, I think it works really well and identifies itself as unique in football, it is supposed to be a take on the punk album "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols" by, of course, The Sex Pistols. Of which St. Pauli made it's own t-shirt version based on the album art. I just decided to take this a little further and incorporate it into the actual shirt.

The shorts are pretty basic but do have a large white trim around the legs to space out the brown a little. Then the socks feature a Argyle diamond pattern in the red and white colour as another unique take kind of replicating grandpa socks. They also feature the Totenkopf at the top and the 1910-2010 at the back.

The sleeves of the shirt feature the Marian stars which can be found on top of the castle in the St. Pauli logo and Hamburg city crest, Another small detail is the coat of arms itself on the back of the shirt at the bottom. Finally to show that it is the clubs centenary year the words 100 Jahre (100 years) are located beneath the St. Pauli logo.

Stafford Rangers

2009-05-16T13:45:00.005+01:00

Well it has been a long time since I posted here, quite sorry for that, but I just went through one of my phases where I just have no desire to make anything, but that changed a little bit with the challenge of making a Stafford Rangers kit for the competition on www.footballshirtculture.com/www.designfootball.com.

I left my entry rather late not to try and be stylishly late (ha!) still just because I had no design until I saw some certain designs on DesignFootball that just made me think something great can be done here and I want to see if I can do something just as good as the rest of the great entries there.

I had been working on a new template as I thought the one I am currently using is a bit boring but I just couldn't get a new one looking the way I wanted so I eventually reverted back to the style which you have often seen on here.

For this I didn't want to make an over elaborate design with lines going every etc. as I just don't think that would suit the Blue Square North league. A league I am quite familiar with actually, my local side Fleetwood Town F.C. plays in it and finished 8th this season (higher than Stafford ;) ). So I just concentrated on using the colours of the shirt to hopefully come out with something different.

The shirt obviously needed to contain black and white stripes which is easy enough to add in but then I needed to make those stripes individual enough to be recognized anywhere which was a tough job as stripes are stripes aren't they? For this I gave the stripes a bit of perspective meaning that they are wider at the bottom and gradually increase in width the further towards the shoulders. Great, but that has been done before with teams like Paraguay and to a lesser extent Dinamo Kiev and Liverpool. This needed to stand out though. I got my thinking cap on (a few strong caffine injections) and eventually came up with the singular half red stripe on the left shoulder with a diagonal cut hopefully giving a bit more of a dynamic look. As a little extra something I decided to give the stripes a bit of a pattern to them, nothing significant just a chequered pattern which is actually intended to contain the mesh strips, but these can hardly be seen.

The shorts are intended on looking quite inconspicuos with a white trim towards the bottom a little bit extra towards the rear. The socks again are intended to be quite inconspicuos also with a white trim and red accents around the rim and also highlighting the 'Rangers' text on the back of the socks.

For the away kit I had much more artistic license but I wanted to keep it simple as possible as I do sometimes tend to over design things. All I did was basically turn the home shirt completely red stripes included but hopefully looking a lot subtler. The red was chosen as it is an intimidating colour and also the sign of quality if you look at what colours the champions of England have worn on all but 3 occasions in the Premier League (Blackburn, Chelsea x2). Naturally I gave it black and white touches where possible, cuffs, shorts etc. I also mainted a simple round collar which as you look back over history has been a regular feature on many classic shirts.

Apple bogies...

2009-04-04T09:35:00.002+01:00

(Apologies)

Sorry that I haven't added any new content here in a while, I have been a little busy recently, and will be for a few more days, but I will add something in the next week. I have also been trying to make a new model for my kits, as I think the one I have been using has become a bit stale. I am going to try something with more of a 3D perspective to it if it is even possible in photoshop 6.

I may also try a few teams in a bit more detail like my first few kits were. As well as being more original in their layout, see Borussia Dortmund, Valencia, Fluminense.

So keep your eyes open and hopefully I'll have something for you soon.

Errea

2009-03-31T14:37:00.005+01:00

Good day to all, hope everyone is doing well since the last dosage of kits I gave you.

Well today is the turn of another Italian manufacturer, Errea, famous for, well not much really, maybe being one of the longest running sponsorships in the English premier league for sponsoring Middlesbrough but other than that I can't think of an awful lot that they are famous for.

For the following kits I was sort of inspired by the crescent shape, I would say the moon but that sounds too sad to say "I was inspired by the moon". Anyway crescent shape, I think it is something which looks really dynamic in the way it has two sharp edges and a smooth curves inbetween them. So as you can see this kit is just loaded with them, from the main shirt, to two on the shoulders, and three inter twined-ones on the shorts. I do realise that the front of the shorts looks a lot like an adidas design from a few years ago but this is purely coincidental.

I have given the kits a very plain ordinary looking v-neck collar as I think Errea do sometimes tend to overcomplicate things with theirs. I have used pinstipes on the socks just because I am a fan of the groovyness of them.

For the font I have used a pretty Americana font, again for not really anyother reason that I thought it looked good and went well with the design.

And that's pretty much all the bollocks I can come up with for now.

For the Parma shirt I am a big fan of their older blue and yellow hooped shirts, it was their identity when they were at their height so I have used that as the home design, if their are any protestations I will make a white and black cross one but I really think this looks classier.

Legea - again

2009-03-28T12:25:00.004Z

As I promised you, a few more Legea kits.

Legea

2009-03-27T14:37:00.006Z

Hello, today is the turn of Italian manufacturer Legea, a brand which I am not really a fan of, but they do manufacture a number of interesting teams so I thought I would have to make something.

I've tried to keep it looking typically Legea, but I was desperate to make the big brand markings on the sleeve disappear, so that doesn't feature anywhere but the back of the socks now. I took inspiration for the collar from an LA Lakers basketball jersey, I am not a basketball fan just a good thing to get you to sleep :D

I have also gone for a really simplistic look and not added any sponsor logos to these jerseys, to try and show off the design more than being distracted by garish looking sponsor logos, all that is on any of them is league logos where applicable. Something which I neglected from my previous Hummel kits as I thought it would make the sleeve area look far to busy.

I have tried to add personal touches of the club to the design where possible, bottom of the socks, top of the socks, bottom of the back, I think looking back I could have done more to make them individual, maybe some city crests etc.

I have also added a different colour waistband sort of emulating the look of a belt, this is something which I can't think of too many other designs having included other than on of my favourite Nike designs, think World Cup 2002. I think it gives a rather classy touch and breaks up the colour of the shirt from the shorts.

Opinions are welcome very much and requests taking for people who post here as always.

I have made a few more kits in this design already but I'll post them later to get you to return ;)

Hummel, the third and final

2009-03-26T00:54:00.002Z

I just found one more which I neglected to upload, this is all now, I promise to you!

Hummel, the second coming

2009-03-26T00:39:00.007Z

Here are a few more kits I made in the Hummel style which I didn't post before, mainly because they're not all that special.

Remember, just comment on a post if you have a request!

Hummel

2009-03-25T13:06:00.007Z

Well welcome back for another helping of my kit designs. This time it is the turn of the Hummel brand.

So what can I say about these kits? Well, not much to be honest a lot of it was trial and error, the only part of the kit which I had planned in my head before I started was the shoulder panel and the shape of that, it was something I thought had never really been done before so would be quite original the only one close I could think of was the Adidas design a couple of years ago which nations like France, Germany and Greece carried.

The shirt sports the traditional Hummel chevrons on the sleeves and shorts and also wrapping around the socks. Every shirt has its own unique water mark one it with a symbol of the club or city that the team is from. I have done this not only to add something unique to the shirt but also just because I have a weird, sickening admiration for shirts with watermarks and have noticed that they seem to look dated quicker than normal shirts, and I saw this as a challenge that hopefully this won't be the case.

The striped shirts have been given a wavy makeover and then faded out as it proceeds to reach the hummel logo and team logo which I have both placed on the right hand side of the shirt, on thing that I did admire from Puma's most recent range and think it works equally as well here.

I'd also like to say I've changed my shadowing on the shirts as I was inspired by recent kits made by the user Meyer1 at DesignFootball.com, inside the collar has been changed to the same sort of style. I have also added some shadow onto the front of the shirt, adapted from the Valencia kit I made which is also a feature of his shirts.

Enough of my gabbing now, I'm not even sure most of it makes sense.

Of course as ever if you comment here I'll make any team you request in this Hummel style, or any of my previous styles where possible.

Something old...

2009-03-21T13:04:00.005Z

Well as I've not created anything recently, not without a lack of try might I add, I thought I should show you some of the stuff I did for FIFA'07. When you think about it their isn't really a whole lot different between the two styles of now and then, just with the FIFA kits I had to make sure everything was in place under the arms and stuff you cant even see in the 2D version.

These are the first ones I found and as you can see I enjoyed making kits for the not so popular teams back then and even teams that were not in the game just the the follow St. Pauli and Dinamo Zagreb kits.

Not much else to saw other than here they are.

Ireland - Happy St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-17T09:00:00.007Z

Top o' the mornin' to ya and all the other Irish stereotypes,

Well as it is St. Patrick's day today I thought I should extend the use of my Umbro template across to our Irish brothers as they will be sharing their fine brews with me today, can't wait to tuck into my first Guinness of the day.

As far as this goes for innovations it is pretty much see the England and Sweden kits, I can't say the template has been adjusted too much just the collar has been adapted to take in the tricolour of the Irish flag.

Aswell as this I have also made sure to have an original font as has been the case with the two previous Umbro kits I made, I tried to make it look a little bit traditional Irish too, not sure if I have achieved that though, I will leave it for you to decide.

I've thrown a clover on the back and wrote 'Éire' (Ireland) on the font, to try and spice it up a little on the traditional front, I did have the idea of adding a sort of Gaelic pattern to the whole thing, but I just didn't think it worked so well so I ditched it.

Right where is my sheleighley and Ireland shirt (I do own one, bought for this purpose), I'm up for some drunken shenanigens even on a Tuesday!

Oh and I also made something a little bit different, and I actually prefer this whole green version.

Sweden

2009-03-16T14:21:00.002Z

Good day to all, hope that you're all in fine fettle and that I may treat you to a kit cuisine today.

OK so I've had too much lazy time watching cooking shows on TV recently but that's changing now, I'm putting my foot down and wiping the slate clean. From now on any lazy time will be transferred into kit time!

Recently I came up with an England kit design and by proxy and Umbro design and was asked by someone over on FootballShirtCulture.com to make another team in this design to which I am going to duly oblige. Of course with the layout being the way it is with a lot of extra details being pointed out I found it a torrid time and had to do a bit of research to find out what I can add into the foray.

The team I chose was Sweden, having never been there my knowledge of local symbols was pretty obscure but doing the research I found a symbol which has not been used to often in the past with Swedish shirt and that is the 'Tre Kronor' (Three Crowns) which I have used on the back of the shirt and also on a logo which I came up with.

I was looking at the Swedish logo and wanted to come up with something a bit more retro looking but nothing old school and the only way I could think of doing this was to redesign it, strip it to its basics, the basics being the Swedish flag background, I then set about adding on the crowns and circling it with 'Sverige' (Sweden) aswell. I am pretty happy with the results I just hope other people agree with me.

Oh and in the crowns look a little familiar then you'd be right in thinking so, I have used the crown from the Hallmark logo just because it was the most stylized looking crown I could find and didn't think it needed any adjustments for what I was looking for.

Interlude

2009-03-14T17:53:00.003Z

Well I'm giving the kits a little break for the moment to bring you some important news. Today their was a little football match taking place in the north of England in some place called Manchester, anyway the mighty Liverpool F.C. were in town and you know what they won by a pretty hearty scoreline. I'm not sure if I have ever shouted so loud in my life before this day but the decibels were definitely high when Liverpool's number 9 calmly slotted the ball past a helpless Edwin van der Sar, the first time since November since that has happened. Only for another 3 to follow suit and land in the back of the big Dutchman's net, which is the first time that has happened at to the Old Trafford outfit since 1992.

Right I'm going to start working on giving myself a hangover from heaven now, after I day like this I deserve it.

Warning: The below pictures may be upsetting for fans of Manchester United.

Puma

2009-03-13T14:38:00.007Z

Well hello there people, long time no see.

Since nobody commented here as to to which teams I should make in the template I opened it up to random people on MSN telling them to choose whatever names they liked best, which proved interesting. As these people knew what I like they chose a couple of eastern European teams for me to make, these being Zorya Luhansk (Ukraine) and Widzew Łódź (Poland) to add to Tottenham, Italy and the already made Feyenoord.

So now for the unveiling, but first my blurb and reasoning behind what I have done with the design. Firstly for this kit I got my inspiration from trees, as weird as that sounds, I saw their branches and though maybe their is something I could do like that on a football strip, something that maybe looks like it wraps around the body which is where the bold lines on the front, back sleeves and shorts come in.

To give the kits a touch of class I made sure gold was used as a colour on each of them lust little sprinklings here and their whether it be for the puma logo and I constantly used it with the collar as a bit of a trademark effect.

The font is a new gothic font and thought it gave a modern touch with a twist of the past also consistantly outline with gold. I also have a watermark of either the clubs crest or something that represents the club on the back of the shirt (look closely), done in a faint mesh of dots, these for example range from the Feyenoord 'F' to the full crest for Widzew.

As an added touch to the eastern kits I added a skewed horizonal pinstripe just as a different look as I haven't seen it employed too much in kit design so thought it would make a change.

Well that's all the BS I am going to spout for now. Please feel free to give me feedback on them, and I will still accept requests for kits in this style from people who post here.

C'mooooooooooon!

2009-03-11T19:05:00.002Z

I know this blog doesn't receive major views but I still notice the page view counter going up steadily. So even if you don't intend of ever visiting here again, just take a look at the list and give me the name of a Puma team. You're not signing a contract or anything that you need to come back here and see it, I just want some way to make the teams that I'm going to make automated as I feel I will probably make the same ones over and over again. Not that it's a bad thing for me, but that's not usually what other people want to see.

Their are 2 positions left, as I opened the voting on FootballShirtCulture.com and so far we have:

Italy
Tottenham Hotspurs

So come on and even if it does fill, I'll still allow whoever posts here to get whatever they want no matter if they're already made by Puma or not, hows about that for a deal?

I Want You!

2009-03-10T22:03:00.002Z

Good evening people, after that thrilling night of football I am pretty much lost for words and that's not the alcohol talking, Madrid taking their biggest European shafting in their from Liverpool, Michael Ballack's controversial handling of the ball, Buffon's lucky escape, Bayern giving out the biggest beating in champions league history and Panathinaikos being dumped out at home by Villarreal. Just so many things to talk about!

As this is a kit blog however, I shall not be discussing any of the above, I will however be giving you the option to tell me what kit you want to see. I completed my new Puma template earlier today and want you to tell me which teams you want to see in the new design.

Rules are as follows, the team must already be being manufactured by Puma, so you can't go around pick Liverpool for example to wear it. Also I have already made Feyenoord in the new design so they're off the list.

That's it, they're all the rules.

A pretty concise list of what teams Puma manufacture can be found on Wikipedia, but do be warned the list looks a little out of date to me as I know a few teams are no longer made by Puma.

England

2009-03-10T13:24:00.005Z

Another day another dollar, but it's not that bad is it, the sun is shining, even though it's the first time it's done that in over a year and I've only just woken up, perfect. Today I'm having a dead day off see here for cultural reference, so that means for me having a beer, going for a strole, eating disgustingly fatty foods, watching some football and other boring stuff inbetween.

As I am sure you've heard the launch of the new England shirt is imminent, so I thought I'd get in the act in creating something which I'd like seeing England wear. Believe me making something cool looking for England is really hard, their isn't much to work with at all, using the red cross in the design is difficult to make look good as the garish red looks very bad concentrated in one place. White with a dark blue trim look relatively boring also, and don't get me started on using light blue as a substitute for them.

So for my first attempt I used what I define in my head as being typically England and that is white with a red trim, even though this is a more modern association I still prefer it to the previous white/dark blue strips from the 90's.

The whole design basically came up just from drawing a few shapes and working from that, and in this case I started on the back and worked my way from there. First to make it typically Umbro I took what they've been using as a base design and flipped it vertically so their is a sort of arrow pointing up to the collar, yeah I stole their idea, shame on me. I also stole the idea for the layout of the kit too, I have just been really impressed with a few other kit makers recently such as Azmie aka Switch image and also Amadeus Angelillo for kits like this, I like how they show enlarged parts of the kit to show off the detail, I am not a fan of the blurb that goes with it, but it was something that had to be done to explain why that part had been enlarged, also it means the compostion of the image is far better.

I then waited to see what comments I receieved which were all quite positive and constructive, so I took all of them on board, "England kit should have less red", "try with the new logo", "I don't like the position of the Umbro logo on the shorts", "I'd like to see it with the light shade of blue". All of which I obliged and added an extra bit of red trim to the shirt and shorts and this ammalgamation came out.

Personally I am more of a fan of the dark blue version and it turns out that everyone else was too, get that?

Anyway, if you want to see any Umbro team in this template post up a comment with the request and I'll try and get it done, maybe a bit harder since I have to find details to highlight etc. but I'll try my best to get it done.

Kappa

2009-03-09T22:46:00.006Z

Hello my fine blog viewing public, hope you're all well. I'm just settling down having a well earned frosty beer, and thought now be a good time to make another update.

So now I introduce you to my Kappa collection. I thought this time I should make a more detailed looking template rather than my first two Kappa kits I made, something more technical looking but like with my Nike and Adidas templates I wanted to make something which fit Kappa as a company.

As I am sure you know, Kappa like to recycle previous templates and modify them slightly to give a whole new effect, no? Well you should do to be reading something like this. Anyway, that's exactly what I have tried to do. The template in question again is from around the 2003/2005 period, a golden time for kits in my opinion, although I can only remember it being used with two teams, Auxerre and Real Betis, maybe it was used on Italy too but I'm unsure of that.

As with all Kappa kits I have tried to make the seems look like they're that inside out sort, you know what I mean right. I have also given the the kits an off center look, something which I am quite fond of looks wise, well for the most part I have. As you can see Botafogo is symetrical and so is Valencia apart from the shorts. When designing South American team kits I tend to make them a bit different from the original template as that also seems to be the norm when it comes to that.

Anyway, I have a whole stockpile of Kappa teams that I made so if you would like to see any, just post a request in the comments section and I'll post it right up for you.

Rapid Wien

2009-03-09T15:49:00.002Z

Just time for a quick post, this is made from the same Adidas template as the previous Milan kit.

As with all Austrian league kits their is a whole host of sponsorship logos and I just wanted to add as many as I could to give it that little bit more realism. This is actually a kit specifically design for the club captain Steffen Hofmann, well not the kit design but the sponsors, on all the rest of the players jersey the main sponsor would usually be the 'Wien Energie' logo that you see on the sleeve, with that being replaced by the 'OWV/OMV' logo.

On the back of the collar is the crest of Vienna, which I slightly modified to contain the diagonal green and white stripes that you can see contained within Rapid's logo. An added touch of personalisation to the strip is the writing at the bottom of the back which reads Rapid ist uns're Religion ("Rapid is our religion") the slogan of the fans of Rapid.

I think this design works really well with Rapid especially with the diagonal front stripes, as their recent history has been tainted with stipes going in all different directions, horizontal, vertical and this season a singular diagonal stripe, so I think this is maybe a natural progression along with Adidas' dynamic look.

Please let me know if their are anyother Adidas sponsored teams you think would suit this design and I will work on bringing them to you.

Old 3D Kits

2009-03-09T14:34:00.006Z

Hello all, I thought I would spice things up a little and chuck in something you've probably not seen before and something I haven't seen in quite some time too, it's my 3D FIFA shirts I told you about before!

All these kits were made in Photoshop to start with then modelled in OEdit which basically uses EA's 3D model for their games and displays them without having to enter into the game itself.

So I'll keep this short and just show you what I was doing nearly 4 years ago! I can't believe it has been that long at all.

AC Milan

2009-03-08T20:16:00.003Z

Hello again kind people, still backdating here so bare with me. "Grizzly?" I hear you cry.

I found this really tough to come up with a good looking design for Adidas even though I thought it would be easiest to come up with some quintessentially Adidas look but alas I found it the hardest yet and still am not happy with it, but I will modify it in the future as soon as I can come up with some better ideas.

This Milan kit is far from what I'd consider traditional for them. First off I have given them diagonal stripes, something which I can't think has ever been done before. Fitting in with this slanted theme I have layed the 3-stripes diagonally over the shoulders which I think gives a rather dynamic look to it. On the back of the collar and neck I have tried to add some personallised touches such as the city of Milan crest with a star and the number 17 located within it, and above that the typical Milan nickname 'Rossoneri' which has become a pretty regular feature on most of the Adidas kits.

The shorts are very boring and something I seriously need to improve design wise. I have kept with the slanted theme though, putting the short number on a diagonal to match with the short mesh. Also the Adidas 3-stripes symbol is located on just the one side of the shorts leading down to the logo itself giving what I hope is quite a modern look.

The socks are quite basic with 'ACM' and Adidas logo accompanied by a semi-hooped look, by that I mean the hoops are divided up by the text and logos where as their could be 4 their are 2. I told you I babble on a lot.

Nike

2009-03-08T18:54:00.011Z

Here for another instalment? Well since no one visits here you can't be, but if you're reading this then you are, which begs the question if a tree falls in the wood and no one is around to witness it, does the tree make a noise?

Well I am babbling a lot, but it is what I do best, and if you've read the previous articles I am sure you are aware of this.

This time I have made a template for a range of Nike football teams. I had tried to keep in within what define as typically Nike, radical up to date sports designs with a modern edge, pushing boundaries and all that malarkey. Some of my all time favourite kits are Nike, especially the Total90 range and the range used at the Japan/Korea World Cup such as the Korean and Croatian designs. Which is why for my own design I have made sure to use influences of these, namely the name patch on the back. Also in keeping with the Nike way, I have used a lot of sharp corners and well rounded edges.

The biggest flaw with the design is that the space for sponsor logos on the front is minimal but I am sure this could be modified and still look good and give maximum space for logos.

All the kits of the range have their own personal symbol on the back of the shirt just below where the number is located and also employ a small rounded turn-up collar much like that of the England home kit from a few years before.

I have kept details rather sparse on this range opting not to use a shadow illusion of any sort on them to highlight other features on the kit.

Here are a few of the ones I am particularly pleased with:

Fluminense FC

2009-03-08T11:49:00.002Z

For this shirt I tried to carry off what I did for my last shirt but in a slightly different presentation style. I opted to try and recreate the famous Estádio do Maracanã in the background which I think maybe detracts from the actual shirt a bit to much, I tried to make it in a quite rough minimal style but I think I did use too much detail after all.

Overall I am quite disappointed with this creation but I know it could have been done so much better. The font at the side in hindsight looks very amateurish and I don't think the logos properly blend in with the shirt especially the main Unimed logo. Maybe this is from lack of perspective and my lack of skills in this side of design creation.

I can't really think of much else I want to say about this other than please don't be to harsh on me.

Valencia CF

2009-03-08T11:28:00.003Z

Here is one I am quite proud of, I can't saw it's entirely original but I have adapted it to my needs. I was largely inspired by the look of music posters for the way I have displayed this trying to use a human model to display the kit.

The kit itself is a rather simple one with not many design features, just like my previous Dortmund kit. This contains a plain V-neck collar with a bit of orange piping features, which also can be found on both the shorts and socks as orange has been found on many previous modern Valencia kits. One of which is one of my favourite shirts of all time, that being the one to the left.

As you can see I have given the shirt black sleeves also like my favourite Valencia shirt. I pretty much just took this and slapped a couple of different logos on it. I did try it with a Toyota logo too, to give it a 'retro' look, but then opted for a more modern looking Valencia Experience logo only to find out they are now going to be using Unibet as their main sponsor for the new season.

From the criticism I have received for this design, which was all mainly positive, was just that the socks let it down. Again I was attempting to bring back the essence of that 03/05 kit or whenever it is from again, which had the word 'Valencia' coming from the top of the sock and down the calf, so I just tried reversing it and hoping it would work.

Borussia Dortmund

2009-03-07T18:50:00.002Z

Right well I suppose I better had get posting some kits and designs here or what's the point?

Here is one of the first 2D designs I created. It's nothing special to look at but I was just getting started, I created it first of all with a white colour and cuffs but due to a Dortmund fan disliking the idea I changed it to black. It's very simple, a round black collar with "die Schwarzgelben" (the yellow-blacks) wrote on the back of the collar and a star to signify their Bundesliga triumphs. Kappa text wrote on the shirt with a double black stripe behind the BVB logo, which was supposed to be a sort of a take on the 'go faster' design you see on cars.

I didn't make shorts or socks with this as like I said before it was just my first go and I wanted to try some stuff out, I am personally not happy with the shadowing on the kit, I had one comment saying the arm looks like a sweat patch although it is just meant to be the crease. However I do think using a gradient to seperate the layers by using slightly different colours worked well.

A beginning...

2009-03-07T13:51:00.000Z

Welcome to this here blog, I am very new to all this sort of stuff so please bear with me. I am a football fanatic and enjoy every aspect of the game but one in particular is football shirts and the designs that go into them. I have been interested in this ever since owning Total Club Manager 2003 on the PC and wanting to customise the game with better looks kits than EA had made for the game. So I took up designing my own stuff, which when I look at now is very poor work indeed, I might post a couple up sometime. I practised a lot though and now I am pretty decent and even got a reputation for being one of the best kit designers in the FIFA community.

I sort of fell out of love for a year or two with making and designing kits and now since I tend to have a lot of time on my hands recently have decided to get back into it, this may involve FIFA too from time to time, but I have began to enjoy making 2D designs a lot more than the tedious process of 3D modelling them for a game. So that's where this comes in, I just wanted somewhere to showcase my work online and find what people think of my work.

I have always used Photoshop 6 (ANCIENT) to make everything, I have upgraded once before to CS but I really couldn't grasp it so reverted back to trusty version 6, even though I know it isn't as powerful I still try and get the best from it and invent techniques to do something that would take seconds to do in the newest photoshop or illustrator.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy what I do and if you don't, let me know! I always love receiving criticism as long as it is constructive.

Thanks!