When the sport is captured on page

Le sport à la page

Some sports magazine work their look and their graphic design. No reason. And so delight sports fans in search of literature or inspiration.

Launched basically as a unic edition to the occasion of Brasil World Football Cup, Mundial magazine celebrates this year his 5 years. These +/- 130 pages published four a year aim to “ remind you why you love soccer”. After have worked for various medias and agencies, Dan Sandison has become the redactor-in-chief of the journal. He enlights that the cultural universe of the first mondial sport has more impact and breadth than its practice in itself. Thereupon, the magazine gets inspired by foot culture. His logo uses the three bands often present on the shoulders of team jerseys. The first issue was accompanied by cards with portraits of players, similar to Panini cards. The magazine orders illustrations to Osvaldo Casanova, Stanley Chowou Phil Galloway and photographic portofolios to Gerry Cranham or to India Hobson, etc. The reportages are, as much as possible, analogical, and the photographs are taken from the pellicle for — specifies Alex Mertekis — “add a feeling of nostalgia”. In charge of graphic design, he says: “the magazine is constantly evolving, both in content and in design (grid is flexible), and I want it to be unic.” Several editions have offered to the readers the opportunity to choose their cover. Issue 14 which featured 21 headlines with vintage shots of players who had scored in the World Cup. Reading all the articles, sometimes chatting with their authors, Alex Mertekis tries to transcribe, in particular by a hierarchy of titling fonts, the emotions. He explains: “the magazine’s contents speaks about emotions present in football. It is therefore quite natural that I try to transcribe them in the design and I think that this makes the magazine even more accessible to our readers.” On the front cover of the last two issues (16 and 17), there is a new typeface that he designed: “I developed a titling character inspired by the retro numbering of shirts with a touch of little American “College”, to add personality where it is necessary, because the coldness of Universe, used for the information and the body of the text of the articles, had to be compensated and refreshed.”

France has its stadium… of France and Greece has its stadium… Toumba. Located in Thessaloniki, it belongs to the PAOK Salonique omnisports club, known for its PAOK-FC (Football Club) team. Dimitris Papazoglou, graphic designer, has been working for the latter since 2014. He designs Matchday Program, an 48-page informative A5 program, published four times a year for the most important matches in the League. In 2016, he decided, in collaboration with Panagiotis Aroniadis, head PAOK FC new media, to create a new publication: Toumba. He argues: “Toumba is much more than a tool to strengthen the club’s relationship with its devoted fans. We view the publication as a powerful medium celebrating the beauty of the game, and as a cultural project that educates and changes the way how fans see sport and PAOK. Rather than dealing with hot news, our intention is to capture passion, drama, joy or disappointment.” From then on, the designer made the magazine as a field of experimentation. He thinks of each issue as “an exercise in free reflection which aims to combine an approach to a lifestyle associated with a taste for beautiful play”. The main font is the Neue Haas Grotesk: “which fits perfectly with the spirit of the club and its fans. Modern, nervous, sophisticated, simple, strong and confident.”- explains the designer. Number 11, the most recent, is a special edition dedicated to the Greek Cup, won by PAOK-FC. In the first part, it retraces the victory match, focusing on invisible details: a time, an action, the players’ placements are expressed by typographical placement games. Nearly 1,500 black and white images are included in the magazine. Dimitris concedes that conception sometimes follows the rhythm of his personal emotions. He concludes: “I have been a fan of PAOK-FC since my birth and I will be until the day of my death. “

Yes, Stéphane Peaucelle-Laurens teenager played basketball well even though his career dedicated to law took him away from it. He remembers having regretted at that time not having found around him a dedicated magazine. The idea came to him to create “an object that makes you want to open it”. When he meets the designers of Helmo, presented by mutual friends, the project becomes clear… From their discussions, Entorse got born. Published in 2017, the first number made no mistake: its cover reproduced, with an orange Pantone and swelling screen printing ink, the texture of a basketball. The markings on the ground of the playgrounds inspire the logo, composed in VROUM font (distributed Lift Type foundry directed by Romain Coudert and Nicolas Aubert). Several styles of the David (font proposed by Emilie Rigaud at A is for Apple) are used for the text. In the body of the articles, the citations are written in Vulf (a single phase from the OhNoType foundry in San Francisco). Thomas Couderc, from Helmo studio, explains: “Choosing fonts from different registers gives rhythm and liveliness.” 128 pages, 30x38 centimeters, “from the start, there was the idea of ​​a magazine disproportionated in terms of size, which could be deployed. Focus is on the visual, with the possibility of having full page images ”- continues Thomas. Simon Roussin and Bonnefrite are asked to illustrate a victorious match or sketch the face of Pierre Saillant (number 1); Anouk Ricard draws a game part in the form of comic book boxes (number 2). Photographer Benjamin Schmuck draws pop portraits and documents reportages. Also assuming the role of photo editor, he is responsible for orders and the selection of photos. As a prelude and postlude to the content of the magazine, Helmo offers a short visual serie. The one in the first issue shows satellite images of city environments among which sports playground are lost, and other sports fields extracted from GameBoy type video games. In the second issue, reworked archive photos illustrate an event that takes place during certain matches: the excessively violence of smatches destroying the panels behind the basketball hoop, letting the plexiglass shatter. Somewhere else, the net of the basketball hoop becomes, passed through the prism of Helmo’s creativity, a photographic object, treated in black and white for a series in the interior pages and printed with warm-iron on the last cover. The lines of the grounds inspire the graphic designers who transform them on the first page into a pattern. The latter becomes, by the eye of an inner frame cut on the cover, a basket ball. The second issue barely published, Stéphane Peaucelle-Laurens is already dreaming of the third. The editorial line — dedicated to the basketball culture, the tone — frank and direct, are found. Tibetan monks dribble, authorship of the shammgod feint is controversial, and the curtain lifts on the backstage of Afrobasket in Dakar. In Entorse, basketball is played outside the sport field, in the field of culture and sociology.

In march 1966, Wold Cup trophy is stolen in the Methodist Central Hall de Westminster where it was exhibited. Seven days later, it is found back by the english author David Corbett, while he walks his dog, Pickles. The latter will give its name to a free bimonthly magazine which brings together “football, design and wit”. Since 2013, Pickels magazine, 26x17 cm, offers articles and thoughts around football through a random number of stapled pages. Interviews with players (Alex Kivomya in the most recent issue) are followed by various essays: which feeling for people who support a club that interests noone or does the football media create a complicated environment for gay players… The editorial is led by Arnold Bernid, the art direction by Ned Read and Steve Leard. The two designers designed a flexible grid, based on a 2 to 3 column system and punctuated by the Hayford JNL titling font. If series of photographs appear in pages, it is above all the illustration which represents the magazine, and dresses its covers, under the signatures of Meen Choi, Raj Ghunna, Daryl Rainbow…

Apple contributor, specifically as a publisher for Apple Music, Justin Montag dreams of a magazine that talks about basketball, which is lacking in American newsstands. In 2016, he launched with Frock Batten and Chris Dea, Franchise. In US, the term “franchise” means “a team”. On the continent, the sport has a monetary value and the teams are sold and bought, hence the banality of the word across the Atlantic. The contributors to the semi-annual publication are friends of the editorial staff or people spotted in the press or on Instagram. The content of the magazine is aimed at a plurality of profiles, from basketball player to designer, and it is thought as a must-kept object. Thus, it is laid out as an exhibition space where visual sequences follow one another, each introduced by a title and a short text. Particular attention is paid to the paper, which changes over the pages. The publication has become a benchmark for sports brands; some, such as Levi’s, solicit Franchise team which has agreed to integrate advertising pages into its edition, on the condition of designing them itself.

Justin Hammond manages an eponymous gallery of contemporary art in London. He sums up his career in a postulate: “if I don’t think of art, I think of football. If I don’t think about football, I fall asleep. ” Wishing to stay a minimum awake, he created OOF magazine, with his partner Jennie Hammond, Eddie Frankel and Tom Havel; these last two also officiate as editors and graphic designer (for the second) at the publishing house Time Out. The 74-page biannual extends the references to football or collective sports present in works of art and erects certain elements of the sporting sphere into art. Thus, the sleepy and peaceful face of David Beckham, adorning the cover of edition n ° 3, transforms the English player into a sacred icon. The issue is devoted to obsession, worship: former boss of the Spurs basketball team, Martin Jol, talks about his passion for art and a reportage in Ukraine tells a story of fierce loyalty by a group fierce fans of Dynamo Kyiv, Kiev’s main football club. Each article, associated with a color, is introduced by a double page and its text and title are written in Segoe (drawn by Steve Matteson for Microsoft) in color or outlined; the rest of the pages follow an organization in two columns per page.

Athleta crosses the categorical boundaries of different sports to focus on those who make them alive: athletes. Created in 2017, the magazine is a space of creativity and freedom for the photographers of the agency Rise Up, based in the Italian region of Verona. The editor, Giovanni Gallio says: “We work for fashion but we also like realistic and raw photography, typical of reportages. We are passionate about sport. Dynamic, rude and honest, this sector lends itself perfectly to the spirit of freedom to which we aspire. In Athleta, we are not interested in current sports news or commercial logics, we produce reportages, we follow an athlete during his training or competition to create an intimate and natural portrait.” Therefore, the choice of images, depending on Giovanni and the photo editor Sara Capovilla, are made with the desire to show raw reality, rather than an embellished one. Visuals take a large place, supplemented by texts of external contributors.
Connected to the magazine’s name and its motto “Gesta virumque cano” evoking ancient Rome, the graphic designer Alessandra Pavan draws the logo in Romana (Bitstream foundry, drawn by Theophile Beaudoire in 1860, touched up by Gustav F. Schroeder in 1882). Chosen for its classic and epigraphic appearance, the font recalls stone engravings from the Roman era. An optical game is created with the cover picture, the upper line of which matches with the crossbar of the letter A, removed, and coincides with that one of the letter H, lowered.
For the 200 interior pages, the choice of two contrasting fonts, the linear Calibre (Klim Type Foundry), and the serif Leitura (DS Type), was initially dictated by the need to place the Italian text and the translation on the same page. English. Since the second issue, the articles in Italian are located in a separate section at the end of the magazine. However, the two characters continue to coexist in order to rank the content and dinstinguish the articles : Leitura for poetic and narrative stories and Caliber for reportages.

Graphic designer or Racquet’s, Larry Buchanan, chooses the Neutra typeface (designed by Christian Schwartz and offered by House Industrie) for his Q glyph, which evokes the stylized design of a tennis racket. The quarterly, 24x19cm format, erects tennis as a “pop” sport, through visual portfolios (tennis video games, Californian courts etc) ordered, or composed from vintage shots gleaned online and reworked by adding noise and grain. They are accompanied by images in a falsely amateur style: photos taken by phone or by Polaroid, archive images, thumbnails showing extracts from matches. The texts, which focus on the new coaching role of Yannick Noah, or the culinary desires of Benoit Payre, take place in Hoefler Text (foundry Orpheus Pro) and are titled in Neutra. The cover is an opportunity to showcase an artist or creative. For the third issue, Larry and the editor Dave Shaftel commissioned Wilfrid Wood to create a plasticine sculpture of Maria Sharapova. The back cover is a photo by Geoffrey Knott of Roger Federer at the Wells tournament and the ninth number features an artwork by artist Friedrich Kunath.

Mike Willows and Trev Townsend are graphic designers and football enthusiasts… so good could be to combine the two disciplines. In addition to their studio, Not On Sunday, they launch a football publishing house. They publish 200 copies, without precise timetable, of magazines in A5 format, bound in loop saddle stitch. The first, printed in Neon Green Pantone, looks at icons and idols in the football world. On the cover, the names of Dino Zoff, Sergio Battista and Diego Maradona are written, in Knockout HTF49 Liteweight, with a O modified to become perfectly round, like a balloon. A short biography each players is written in the interior pages and a logo is drawn from their initials. The second number is thought during the African Cup of Nations. The stars of the African continent are associated to a pattern, imagined from the flag of their country. The “A” of the NSW01 font (designed by Matt Willey) is customized with reference to the visual symbols Adinkra of West Africa. See red ! is the theme of the most recent magazine. Mike and Trev asked Lawrence Slater to illustrate the anger of some international players. The duo has also produced a font for the jerseys, imagined a calendar… Football Editions is their graphic escape, a real playground.

Umpteenth football fan, and supporter of the Bolton Wanderers, a club near Manchester, Rick Banks is also graphic and font designer at Face37 and its associated foundry, F37. Combining his passion with his skills, he published two books: I belong to Jesus and Football Type. The first refers to a tradition of taking off your team football shirt at the end of the match to reveal a second t-shirt with a message. The second celebrates the link between football and typography by listing anecdotes about the fonts used on jerseys or for club communication. It was sold in 1000 copies for the benefit of the Football Foundation, with the aim of helping the amateur football club Horwich St Marys of Bolton. The covers, woven, were multiple: each was adorned with a number, in a font used for the English Premier League. Rick Banks tells some stories from the book: “Real Madrid’s 2011 gold optical font, designed by Anthony Barnett of Sporting iD, does not looked only great, but matched with the gold trim on the jerseys. Every good design has a story behind — the font here pay homage to iconic players of the previous century, such as the winner Alfredo Di Stefano. Another great example is Paul Barnes’s double lettering for England in 2012. His use of two different reds had never been done before. Gregory Bonner Hale’s “Gaffer” typeface for PUMA is a very distinctive creation that was later used for merchandising, advertising campaigns and video games.” If he explains that English teams are forced to adopt the visual style of the championship in which they play, he notes the audacity of the London club Tottenham : “It is the only English club that I know who has contacted a branding agency to work on his identity. The graphic design agency redesigned its logo to make it modern and clean ; and asked Chris David to design a specific font. When fans read Tottenham’s motto: “To dare is to do” in the Tottenham Hotspur font, they immediately recognize the club, even if it is on a subconscious level.” Clubs are brands like any other.

Published in France in magazine etapes n°249