Club Africain (النادي الأفريقي) & FC Atlas

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)

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...

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...

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)

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

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)

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

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.

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?

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.