Typographic Book Design (Arsenal F.C Theme)
I am currently enrolled in a Graphic Design program at Humber College and I am in my 3rd year. I’ve had a lot of assignments to do over the course of my time attending Humber and have built up a solid portfolio while doing so. One class I’ve had was called Typography. I was given a brief to design a miniature book (5"x5") in a theme of my choosing. Being a huge soccer fan I decided to create my book in the theme of my favourite club Arsenal.
Arsenal F.C is a professional football club based in Islington, London, England that plays in the Premier League, the top flight of English Football. The club has won 13 league titles, a record of 13 FA cups, two league cups, 15 FA community shields and one UEFA Cup Winner’s Cup.
After figuring out what theme I wanted to do I had to decide on a font. I have always been a big fan of Helvetica so I chose to use that font throughout my book. Coming up with a strategy of how I wanted to layout the pages was next. I decided to split my book up into 4 sections which consisted of The Stadium (background, stats, timeline), The Players Journey (when the arrive at the stadium, match day schedule), The Tunnel (what its like walking through for the players) and The Pitch (facts about the pitch).
This is the front cover and the inside pages. On the front cover the main focus was to highlight the theme and explore the font. I decided to use a Bold weight to make the title stand out. For the inside covers the approach was to make it clean looking by having the Arsenal logo dead center followed by the publishers page flushed right and centred as well.
These pages were my Table of Contents. It highlights what to expect in this book from the stadium information to when the players arrive and make their way onto the pitch to play.
This is one of my favourite pages designed. I wanted to get as much detail about the stadium as I could fit without losing yourself in the text. The solid red background playing off of the teams colours compliments the white text really well and is legible. You will find stats about the stadium like how much capacity it holds, how much grass is on the pitch, how many doors in the stadium, flights of stairs, how many handrails as well as how many toilets.
When creating these pages I wanted to make it aesthetically pleasing. Having overlaying background of the stadium with a 70% opacity creates a nice dark look and the red and white overlaying text and objects complete the design. On these pages you will find information about the history behind the Emirates Stadium from when the first training session took place, first game, first goal score and also includes a timeline if the viewer wanted to just skim the page briefly without reading all the text.
This page was a really fun to design and I found myself really interested when researching the information. Im sure there’s a lot of people out there that wonder what the players go through before heading onto the pitch so I wanted to highlight that in my book. On these pages it explains the players process from the night before, to player meetings, arriving at the stadium, playing the match and then press afterwards. All of which are organized neatly in a chart with times corresponding to each event taking place.
The Tunnel. Every players dream to walk out of and hear the crowd roaring. These pages I felt didn't need much text because its something you live and is hard to explain fully the feeling of walking out. The pictures I used give you a mental picture of walking out onto the pitch without physically experiencing it.
The last design of the book had to end with the pitch. After going through the stadium stats, learning about the players journey on match day, to the incredible feeling of walking through the tunnel onto the pitch. This isn’t just grass. Its the most admired playing surface in world football. Its made memories and superstars. The technology used under the grass is a whole new level. Measuring the temperatures daily that sets it to a certain degrees, multiple air flow systems running throughout, to the 300mm of root consisting of 90% sand, 3% organic matter and plastic fibres stitched throughout, the pitch is no joke.
This was one of my favourite assignments to do because I got to design a book about my favourite club. Not only was the designing aspect fun but the researching was as well because I found out information I haven’t even known and was taken back by it. The amount of work it takes to maintain this stadium to top shape day in and day out is impressive.