Category Archives: Flags, Symbols, and Crests

Detroit City FC, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Kit Post 2023

18 November, 2022 Niamh

Hello and welcome all to the ninth annual Detroit City FC kit post! Whether you’re new to Detroit City or new to this site, each year I do a run down of the previous Detroit City FC season, review the out-going kits the club wore, and I mock up three potential kits for the upcoming season – home, away, and a clash/charity kit.

Here are the links to the previous kit posts:

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022

There are probably people, mostly people whose personalities are born and bred on the birdsite, who will consider 2022 a not great year for Detroit City. Whether for the impact USL-C had on the club and supporter culture, for the growing pains that popped up throughout the year, the bitter cold of those first handful of games, or for the “disappointing” (heavy emphasis on the quotes) result.

I must attest that, at least on the pitch, I was extremely satisfied with the product and the results the club put out. Moving from NISA to USL-C was a move up in more ways than one, and I was expecting a season where we attempt to not be embarrassed more than actually attempt to win. However, the NISA All-Stars put out quality games. Sure, we didn’t make a deep run into the playoffs, but back in March I wasn’t expecting to make it to the playoffs at all. So that’s a massive success already, and it means that the club has a strong foundation to build off of.

The next few years are going to be so exciting for Detroit City. I can see us really becoming a power house over the next few years, especially with the right signings and coaching. We’re so close. We can do this.

Meanwhile, a lot of controversy was going on off the pitch – mostly in the stands. I will not comment on every event, first because it’s not the point of this blog, second because I don’t remember them all, and third – I don’t want to come off as an authority. Generally though, my opinions run from unhappy and rebellious to unhappy but pragmatic.

Personally, I think my time in the midst of all the smoke and the pounding of drums might be reaching its conclusion and thus so too my pontificating on the matter. Perhaps I am getting bougier, perhaps I am getting older. It is very likely that it’s a combination of those things, but also a subtle shift in what I want out of the game day experience. The Niamh of 2023 is quite different than the person who was going in 2012. Less is the need for tribal belonging and aggressive venting, and in its place a need to be seen, to enjoy, to exist outside of my home office, to have my cocktails and catch up with friends and perhaps throw eyes at potential new friends.

Starting next year, I will be in the VIP section more than not. I basically consider it pre-paying for about $300 of drinks and food, which I do regularly get each game. My plan as of writing (October of 2022) is to coëxist both in the stands and the VIP section, but generally, I expect to make those retreats when needed.

But what about the kits?” you might be asking. “I’m here for the kits” to which I might reply, “Oh! Kits! You said Kits. Sorry, I misheard you. I thought you said- you know? Never mind.”

The 2022 Detroit City kits will always be the kits from our first USL-C season, which in-and-of-itself is a big deal. Potentially that is enough to make them something special, though I am hesitant to go all-in on that idea. Looking back to the 2020 kits, those aren’t exactly the most memorable set, but there was a lot going on in 2020 that might’ve prevented them from solidifying in my mind.

Detroit City donned four kits across 2022 – home, away, and two charity kit designs (one for the women and one for the men) and from those four it’s hard to pick a “best” in the worst possible way. It will have to fall to either the home or away because… sublimation, but outside that I think all four kits are less than great.

The home kits – all rouge with a rouge-colored sash was an interesting choice for a follow up to one of the best DCFC kits of all time. I like the sash as an element, but I think these kits fall into a serious uncanny valley of being needlessly complicated? I never really thought of the two-tone kit this year as anything other than just solid rouge, if that makes sense. I think the lacking piece was the Adidas piping being the same color as everything else. You might as well have deleted the piping and left them as is. The sash never popped in such a way to stand out. Even my wiki kit mockup was pretty plain, and we all know I hate plain. In that way, the 2020 and 2022 home kits share a bit in common – I forget that they had anything going on at all.

I think, on paper, the 2022 away kits would’ve made more sense if the home kit had been stronger. I just legitimately have zero attachment to the away kit at all. The design elements make sense, but again, there’s not much going on. Had the home kits had more, been better, the away kits would’ve snapped into sharp focus. They definitely meet the definition of “clean” I constantly bandy about on this site, but… I don’t know, they just didn’t mean much to me. Maybe it was the lack of trophies? Maybe there was a malaise over the entire season, coming out of the libertarian madness of NISA and into the corporate mundanity of USL-C that just subtracts from these two kits. Maybe if we won more. Maybe if we lifted more trophies. Maybe if something these kits would’ve magically worked. Inevitably the kits both define and are defined by the season. A great season can bring great meaning to a kit. But a great kit can make a mediocre season memorable. And that’s the problem. We had a good season, we broke expectations in mediocre kits, and that leaves them both unmemorable.

Lastly, and leastly, the charity kits. I hated both of them? They were awful, cacophonous messes of sublimation. I’m stoked we raised money for great causes, I’m so happy we got to do good with them – just wish we had looked good in the meantime. I assume this signals a trend – the custom Admiral kits for charity and the Adidas kits for the “main” kits. Part of me wishes we’d return to a special kit for the charity, still Adidas, but just a little bit more off the beaten path. I wish we’d consider another go like 2019 with a full third kit. We’ve shown that we can do stuff like auctioning off normal kits. But as we get bigger and are able to get more out of Adidas, maybe that won’t be the case. Perhaps we’re nearly at the point of considering another supplier.

Perhaps I am overusing “perhaps” in this post.

We live in a time of uncertainty. A time of ‘perhaps’ when we need certain answers.

I have no certain answers for you, dear reader, only thoughts and conjecture. I read the tarot of the kits. Some things are clearer than others. However; somethings are obvious:

I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official nor necessarily endorsed by our front office
- I refuse to include the Chevy logo on my work, deal with it
The reality of 2023 might be very different than what I predict here

The Home Kit

The 2023 Home Kit Prediction – Rouge with horizontal pinstripes and gold trim

I went through a lot of iterations on my home and away kits this year, slowly honing in on something that worked for me. Like the club, I usually alternate between years with a lot going on and years without so much. Last year for the home kit, we had the hoops, this year pinstripes.

The 2021 Kits were something amazing, and I want to build off that more. Some clubs are defined by features as much as colors (e.g. Celtic and green/white hoops, Newcastle and black/white stripes), but Detroit City isn’t one of those clubs. We can have hoops, sashes, pinstripes, nothing at all so long as the kits are that lovely, rich rouge color. Making the gold trim something that all home kits have going forward would be amazing, and draw a serious line of continuity even as features come and go. I’m not sure if I want to see bigger gold features, for example, a gold sash, but I’d at least be interested in seeing it.

This is what I mean by the difficulty of designing a home kit. I can’t imagine having these difficult discussions regarding the away kit. Want a gold sash? Done. Want a rouge band? Done. There’s no problem there. But when you talk about making a serious change to the home kit there’s a hesitation I feel in my gut. Will this be something that adds to the history of Detroit City kits? Or subtracts from it? I’ve done mockups with, for example, gold hoops and I cannot help but feel that it’s not a Detroit City home kit. A training top or a one-off charity kit, but it’s not a home kit.

So perhaps this is a “safe” design. Clean and simple. Three tones of rouge (the base, the lighter piping on the shorts and hems, and the darker stripes), but I think it is a strong design balancing everything I’ve talked about above.

The Away Kit

The 2023 Away Kit Prediction – White with a rouge and gold chevron

Working on the away kit is always a ton of fun, and I often get caught up in making dozens of potential designs, many just iterating on one strong design, drilling it down to something amazing. In previous posts, I’ve talked about wanting to do an homage to the 2013 kits with the rouge band across the chest. The 2013 away kit was the first DCFC kit I’ve ever bought, and I absolutely love it. It’s a fun kit with a variety of elements: the white body, the rouge band, the champagne sleeves.

Here I went to a sort of parallel homage – substituting a multi-colored chevron for the rouge band. Sure the sleeves are still white, but the champagne is captured in the piping and the chevron. Rouge piping on the shirt hems and on the shorts with a little two-tone going on in the collar.

Part of me wants to start a completely alternative discussion to the one above? Is it time to consider having a bit more fun with our away kits? White makes up the majority of our away kits despite us being the rouge and gold, so my gut is thinking do we move more permanently to champagne? Or do we let go all together? Can Detroit City pull off an orange away kit? Or a purple one? I Legitimately don’t know. Something about having both home and away kits fit the club’s color profile is uniquely American to me, a carry over from gridiron. But maybe that’s not actually the case, maybe I just don’t know because I’m used to clubs in the EPL having a very solid home design and the away kit having a bit more variation. Newcastle United has shown this over the years.

But what I do want to reiterate is what I said above – you gotta have at least one kit knock it out of the park, and I feel like the 2022 Detroit City kits didn’t provide. So for 2023 we need a strong slate of kits. Which brings us to my favorite kit to work on…

The Clash/Alternative Kit

The 2023 Clash Kit Prediction – Black with rouge sleeves and socks

The clash was the third of the three kits I started on and the second I came to a final decision on. It started with black and pastel pink. But as I played around with the options and variations, I really couldn’t shake the Inter Miami vibes, which was extremely disappointing. When I eventually moved on to the black/rouge combination.

I wanted a look that would be instantly iconic. I think I hit the bull’s eye with this design. We’ve seen some black and gold kits but something I’d like to see is black and rouge. When the two colors are so close together, you’re going to have to take steps to really emphasize them, so here, instead of just piping or some small features, I went with the sleeves and the socks. The more heavily contrasting gold comes in as piping on the shorts, in the collar and sleeves, and the hem of the top.

This sort of design, one that fits in with the rest of the options is perfect for an alternative or clash design, not just a a charity match or two.

There are some kits that years later folks still talk and think about, those ones that made bold choices and stuck to them. I think the black and gold third kits really embody that, or for another example, the Kitman Moy kits from the same year. I don’t think we’ve had a design since that really bucks the convention and gets not just talked about, but used. I might sound a little curmudgeonly here – but I’m fucking sick of the one-off sublimated kits. I really am. Let’s see something with some meat.

Three amazing kits, I think! There’s a lot that makes them different, there’s even more that ties them together!

The Sketches

Despite the ending in Memphis, 2022 was an extremely memorable year for Detroit City FC. Our first season in the USL-C, our first playoff spot, our first playoff loss. I for one certainly did not see it coming, though I dared to hope. I dared to hope quite a bit through the 2022 season – whether it was a playoff hosting spot or even just a playoff spot at all. The club and the staff really rose to the occasion on the pitch and despite growing pains off the pitch, I think we saw a lot of progress and improvements.

As my time as a “hooligan” comes to a close, my involvement with the club only grows. First with the 2022 Prideraiser campaign, which many of you contributed to and made a massive success. And now as a member of the Fan Advisory Board. I hope to continue to support and represent all fans, but especially queer fans, as the club continues to grow.

I have high hopes for 2023.

Hit me up on Twitter or Mastodon with your thoughts about 2022 and 2023, what did you think of the kits in particular and what would you put Detroit in for the upcoming season? If anyone wants to commission me, I have a portfolio and pricing page on this site. Feel free to drop a line.

Cheers, everyone!

Background Photo Credit:
Photo 75098233 © Jesse Kunerth | Dreamstime.com

Detroit City FC, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Kit Post 2022

25 November, 2021 Niamh

Welcome, welcome to my eighth annual Detroit City FC kit post. For those new to the site, new to Detroit City, or both, let me give you a quick idea of what this yearly even is about: when a Detroit City kit reaches the end of its life, usually at the end of a season, but sometimes at the end of the year (this time it’s both), I do a review of the out-going kits and design a set (home, away, third) of new kits for the upcoming year/season.

If you need a handy guide to my previous updates, here you go!

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021

2021 was an amazing year for Detroit City, quite possibly the best since the inception. An utterly dominant season that technically started in the fall of 2020, Detroit City won everything that we could. We were so dominant that to keep up appearances and competition, buys and spots in the finals were consistently given to a number of teams with a growing number of asterisks behind their names.

I helpfully updated this graphic for NISA when they tried to hand-wave away that every possible path to the Championship had actually been seized by Detroit City. But I don’t think the league appreciated my efforts.

In the end, though, City saw it all the way through to the end, beating LA Force and gaining that fabled star over the crest. It was an emotional moment for all of us, but for the team it was the plateau that would hold through the end of 2021, when we won our third consecutive NISA “season”-thingy.

It really is hard to emphasize how much of a powerhouse Detroit had become, and instead of the tide lifting all ships, things seemed to get worse. Bad teams just upped the chippiness and physicality, taking advantage of NISA’s unpaid refs and willingness to let red cards just be forgiven with no real fall-out. With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that Detroit City chose to fauxmote to the USL Championship, a move that is rather fraught, so let’s start there (because this really is as much as season retrospective as it is a kit post, despite the title).

My thoughts are mixed to say the least, when it comes to this move. USL has long been a bogey in the dark, looming over Detroit City since our early days and the on-and-off proxy battles with Dan Duggan and the Michigan (now Flint) Bucks. Their model, especially in 2013 and 2014 was MLS but not as good, going as far to act as an MLS stand-in during these battles.

The closed system. The high fees to enter. The countless MLS 2 teams. USL was not where anyone wanted to see Detroit City, and I assume there are folks who continue to not want to see us there, and I won’t fault them that.

While Sean Mann has assured us that our IP is safe and that the gameday experience will almost certainly not change, the latter still needs to be proven, and I’d bet many people will remain apprehensive until the end of time, because if anything, the USL has proven to be as fickle with rule enforcement as NISA has. Lastly, when talking about USL, is how did we afford it to begin with. Word is an angel investor stepped in, one who wishes to remain anonymous, but I don’t think that soothes anyone’s minds. Really, it only bristles us more. So now we have a league that could, at any time, step in and fuck with how we do things and an anonymous owner who could step in at any time and fuck with how we do things – either through direct action or inaction.

On the other hand, we had clearly outgrown NISA and all the worrying warts that made us sigh or roll our eyes aren’t as forgivable two years into the experience, especially given the arbitrariness of them. COVID doesn’t stop NISA from living up to its own rules and its own disclosed values, but shitty league owners do. NISA is “independent” but independent seems to have less to do with not fucking with teams and fans (which NISA is happy to do) and more like “letting certain owners get away with whatever they want so long as they throw a big enough fit”. Plus vetting is apparently non-existent as a number of vaporware teams appear in equal standing with Detroit City, threatening to water it all down for us.

Sure, for many of us NISA was the equivalent of the Titanic in the vicinity of Liverpool circa 1912 – but we’re not in Liverpool anymore, we’re off the coast of Newfoundland and given the choice of staying on the Titanic or jumping over to the Carpathia, some of us see the choice as easier than others.

Does it make hypocrites of all of us?

Unpopular answer – yeah, yeah it does. But you roll with the punches knowing that’s the only thing folks got on you and keep on supporting.

Luckily for me, the kits are a much easier topic to tackle. I absolutely loved both of our primary kits. I especially loved that the squad itself grew so attached to the away kit they were requesting to wear it for big matches and the championships. They couldn’t’ve have picked a better kit to win trophies in, except for maybe the home one. But that’s just me.

The home kits were a perfect example of a clean kit – a phrase that I’ve used in contrast to a plain kit quite a bit on this site. Like pornography and art, sometimes you need to see it to know the difference. A plain kit comes off the rack, or does nothing to look like it didn’t. Whereas our home kits used the gold adidas striping to frame the otherwise “plain” shirt, giving it an extremely intentional and professional look. The gold trim is something I had wanted to see for quite some time, I hope we stick to it. While the all-rouge or rouge-on-rouge-on-rouge kits are okay, I’d rather keep that for elements like hoops or stripes while the gold details can be kept.

Meanwhile, the away kits were absolutely gorgeous. Gold bodies with white sleeves, gold trim on the sleeves and shorts kept them unified with the home kit. And boy did those kits get plastered everywhere on the media. Every time we needed to lift a trophy, there they were. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few new comers who didn’t wonder if we were really Le Champagne. A little-noted feature of all three kits that I adored was that the crest changed to match the kit it was on – rouge and gold for the home, champagne and white for the away, black and grey for the charity kit.

And while we’re on the charity kit – they never grew on me, quite the opposite really. Intricate, sublimated designs aren’t my thing. Plus it required us to use Admiral kits which probably meant that more could go to the Give Merit charity, but eh. I don’t like kits as picture canvases and prefer that designs stick to the old limitations even as everything becomes sublimated now.

Anyway, my usual list of disclaimers, which I’m just copy-pasting from last year because why the fuck not?

I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official nor necessarily endorsed by our front office
- I refuse to include the Chevy logo on my work, deal with it
The reality of 2022 might be very different than what I predict here, I love the challenge regardless

Before we got to the designs, I want to talk briefly on process, because I often touch upon it when writing these posts anyway. Since I am a stickler for very traditional designs, I often “sketch” kits in wikipedia format before scaling them up. I mentioned this forever ago in a post about working on the first Harper’s kits. Recently, I made a photoshop template for free-hand sketching wiki kits, so I don’t have to rely on the finicky template system, instead allowing me to potentially churn out dozens of designs with little or no trouble.

And as of late, that’s where I’ve been starting for bigger projects like this. Getting my thoughts out and on a piece of digital paper allows me to test things out, or get a better grip on the reality of what I’m thinking. Some designs die here because their flaws become obvious or seeing them for real makes me aware that they don’t really look like a Detroit City FC kit.

I’ve been finding this process to really help, especially when it comes to broadening my designs, proper framing, and getting ideas out and on the page without committing too much energy to them. That’s the best thing – the experimentation. Since I’m working in a tiny format with barely any resolution, I can sketch an idea, see it sucks, and move on all in like three minutes, instead of thirty. It means I don’t rely on crutches as much, even though, a favorite of mine is about to appear again.

This year one of the designs to not make it was a throwback to the 2013 kits, with the rouge stripe through the chest on the away kit. I was conceptualizing what a “better” version of that would look like. It just never worked and I knew it wasn’t working without feeling committed to the design. I moved on to another idea I had and it looked much, much better. So that’s what you’ll see here.

And with all that out of the way, let’s see some kits!

The Home Kit

The 2022 Home Kit Prediction – Hoops with gold trim

I’ve often said that the home kit can be hardest, though perhaps the better word is it can be more daunting. There’s a lot of focus on getting the home kit right and folks can be much more picky about what is and isn’t on it. This year I wanted to return to a focus on kits that can be produced by a company like Adidas, after a few years of allowing some slips into the sublimated hell that is dominating US kits right now.

After such a stellar year, I wanted to go back to a reoccurring Detroit City kit – the rouge on rouge hoops. City has worn hooped kits twice before: 2014 and 2017. Of the two, I think the 2017 did it better, and not just because it was Adidas over Nike. The darker “base” with the lighter “hoops” just looked overall better to me, and I wanted to follow up on that. I also wanted to keep the gold framing – we are rouge and gold after all. Having both colors on the kit at once is a good nod to that. I kept it cohesive with little light rouge touches in the shorts, using an extra little line to break up the vertical stripes and at the hem of the shirt, which gives good definition to the overall makeup of the kit.

The Away Kit

The 2022 Away Kit Prediction – Half-and-half champagne and white

Champagne is a difficult color to work with, admittedly. Generally, it doesn’t come out looking like “gold” so much as sandy tan, while “gold” is usually just a highly saturated yellow (think the Packers). Such is the disconnect when working with a color named after a shiny metal. The alternative, for Detroit City, would be white, which is our usual away kit color. Personally? I prefer the champagne, I think it looks better, it’s not a common color for kits, and again, we are the Rouge and Gold, so it’s nice to stick to that.

But as in many things in life, it can sometimes be important to compromise. Gold? White? Why not both. And thus we arrive at a staple design that rarely makes its way to the United States – the half-and-half. Here I’m working with a base of champagne, with the right half of the kit colored white. The sleeves are both champagne, as they are often a separate “item” to be colored on sites like Adidas, with no option to split them. Like the home kit, I wanted to showcase both colors, and so here I use rouge as the framing color in the cuffs and the stripes. And bucking previous trends, I went with the champagne socks – something unseen since 2012.

The Clash/Alternate Kit

The 2022 Clash Kit Prediction – Verdigris

The template I work with is admittedly not that impressive, but it is cheap and it does work for someone who is more of a spirited amateur than a professional. A few years ago I turned off the layers that are intended to add the photorealistic shading and texturing to the kits, in favor of this more cartoony/sketch look. One of the downsides to that was when you made clean kits it effectively came out looking like a romper, with nothing dividing the shirt from the shorts. But this is an actual design concern and this year I wanted to address it with the hem at the bottom of the kit.

Verdigris, the color of oxidized copper, has been a popular recommendation when I seek them out. The Spirit of Detroit, the statue that is at the heart of our crest, is in person a large copper statue and is, in fact, verdigris. It goes without saying, then, that this would be a fantastic choice for an alternate kit, though I think the color would be hard to do in reality. I used gold and black to frame the kit, leaving it otherwise unblemished by design elements. The sleeves have some vertical elements that I saw in my head as going partway around the sleeve, so it wouldn’t just be the ones visible.

The Sketches

The wikified sketches I did before kicking off proper renders.

I mentioned above that I use tiny wiki-sketches to get my ideas down on paper first, so I wanted to include the actual sketches at the bottom of this post. There are some differences for sure – for example the solid bar gold tops of the rouge kit wandered over to the clash. Part of that was just about look. The verdigris kit also had a slightly different collar look, with the gold not completely surrounding the neck, but I just couldn’t get it to look right in the render, so it was dropped. Otherwise, I think I stayed pretty true to the original sketches, and they look amazing in miniature, if I do say so myself.

So that’s that for the 2021-wrap up and the 2022 kit post. As you can see by the sorry state of my site, I don’t really post much to it but this annual shindig, but hey – what can you do? 2021 was a hell year, just like 2020 and there wasn’t much for it.

As always, if you’re interested in commissioning me, you can check out my portfolio/commissions page for what to expect. Have a lovely holiday everyone, and I hope to have more stuff to put on this site eventually other than just “I’m trans” and “I love kits”, but honestly, that’s probably all it’ll be for a while!

Cheers!

Background Photo Credit:
Photo 75098233 © Jesse Kunerth | Dreamstime.com

Detroit City FC, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Kit Post 2021

26 March, 2021 Niamh

To be honest, I actually though I had until this summer to work on this post, which I usually do as a wrap up to the previous season, but noooo~ we’re going to do a mid-season kit change. So here it is fuckers, the kit post twenty-twenty-one

For those new to the site: HI! I mostly post about sports and kits, sorrrrrrry! If it helps I do have something in the works combining kits and trans that will happen eventually^tm. At the wrap up of a Detroit City FC ~~season~~ kit’s lifespan, I do a little write up about the last set, things I guessed wrong or right, and then come up with three new kits (home, away, alt) to get everyone excited for the unveiling of the upcoming kits.

If you want to check out any previous Kit Post, here’s a handy guide:

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

So in last year’s post I went a little off the beaten path and came up with some designs that were a little different both for Detroit City and for myself. I went with heavily sublimated kits in the vein of Inaria or Icarus with details across the actual bodies of the kits that would require some level of customization on the part of the manufacturer.

I think I was closest with the away kits, in which I predicted a white with rouge hooped kit and off-colored socks, and while literally none of that happened, the actual away kit was white with rouge pinstripes and has very much grown on me over the last year. It is, in fact, the 2020 kit that I own, as I rarely buy more than one. It was in the white kits that Le Rouge dominated the Fall Championship, and in those kits we hoisted the cup, which given the climate of 2020, was an amazing and cathartic thing to see. I, for one, will always associate the image of Stephen Carroll pouring an entire can of Stroh’s into his mouth with the Fall trophy with 2020. Victory in the face of adversity, celebration in the face of uncertainty will always be 2020 to me.

The home kits, however, were frustrating to me, visually, the pin stripes so small as to be effectively invisible from far away, yet so painfully obvious when up close, ruining an otherwise crisp kit. They didn’t do it for me, I guess, and this is obviously a quite subjective take. I think it was particularly rough following the very popular 2019 design, which was very, very clean and of course also came with a lot of baggage and trophies. Somehow, though, I don’t feel like I’m missing out not seeing another trophy or three lifted in that particular design.

And there were no alternative kits last cycle, thanks in no small part to COVID. So Nothing to say here.

Anyway, my usual list of disclaimers, which I’m just copy-pasting from last year because why the fuck not?

I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official or necessarily endorsed by our front office
The reality of 2021 might be very different than what I predict here, I love the challenge regardless

I am pleased that so far Detroit City has resisted the temptation of highly sublimated kits, and happy that they’ve stuck with Adidas. We shall see if that continues (I suspect it will given the respectability and reverence for the brand). Say what you will, getting good kits from Adidas just has a certain something to it, it elevates Detroit City, and that’s not worth nothing, especially when you’re talking about charging $80+ for a soccer kit.

Assuming we stick with Adidas, we can actually have some potential throwbacks to our 2013 kits, though maybe those should wait for 2023, then? I sketched them up in October of last year. It’d also be really cool for 2022 being our tenth anniversary or even this year being our tenth season to see the club release a poster with all the kits so far made by Dave at Historical Kits. That would be a legitimate instant grab for me.

Anyway, we’re about 700 words into this beast, so why don’t we move on and get to the goods? Here are my designs for the 2021 Detroit City FC kits!

The Home Kit

After a couple years of more complicated designs, I wanted to get back to something simpler this year, and that’s the theme of this trio – clean. Clean is a hard thing to describe. Clean to one person is plain to another, and plain is bad, it’s boring. So how does one design for clean while avoiding plain? Well, that’s really hard to say. For me, plain kits have no details, and they elicit little emotional investment. Small details, like the gold cuff stripes on the shirt and shirts, the fleurs de lis on the socks mirrored onto the shirt and shorts in small ways to me builds a cohesive whole.

For the home kit, I went with an old-school design that will be familiar to fans (and enemies) of teams like Arsenal and Ajax. The core of the kit is a darker, more purpley rouge, with the outside being brighter. The cuffs and the collar are the darkest, giving a boarder to it all, and of course small golden lines throughout make it cohesive. I always suspect my home kits will be the most divisive, and that’s no different here.

The Away Kit

I really liked the gold and black kits from my 2020 set, and I started with that here. You might notice the same Adidas stripes turning into a colored inset in the pits and on the sleeves. But I wanted to walk away from the black because this is the away kit, which needs to get tied more strongly in with the over-all colors of the club. So here I went with rouge as was the case for the 2017 kits. Detroit City’s first away kits were gold, and they’ve popped up here and there, but gold is a difficult color to work with in manufacturing. In the end you are effectively left with two choices: sand or yellow? In the past, Detroit City has gone the route of sand, avoiding the garish yellows of teams like the Green Bay Packers.

When designing these, it felt very subtractive, which is an unfortunate feeling. I was removing features rather than adding them and here I was having trouble finding a place to add anything of note. I did bring back the fleurs from the home kit, this time only on the shirt, as I have let the shorts remain more clean, letting the white dominate. It is easy to overpower white, especially in the shorts. And I wrapped it up with tow-tone rouge turn-overs on the socks.

The Clash/Alternative Kit

This one is by far and away my favorite of this year. I took a lot of inspiration from the popularity of the 2019 alternate kits, a keepers kit that appeared like exactly once as far as I am aware, and FC St. Pauli. When you have the word “Ally” written across the chest of every kit, it was hard not to want to lean into that in more ways than one. This kit probably took the longest, had a very strange evolution, and was workshopped a bit more than the away kit and far, far more than the home (I rarely workship home kits).

Pink and black are an amazing combo, it’s hard to do wrong, if I’m honest, and that’s good because there might be some fun stuff with Harper’s dropping soon that I’m very excited for. This kit was the hardest when it came to balancing clean and plain, or clean and over designed. Especially when you introduce the pride flag into things, you have a lot of colors competing for attention, which is why reducing them to thin stripes ended being just what the doctor ordered. Originally, for example, the whole cuff was a pride flag, which then makes the sleeves look busy, which then makes the shirt look paradoxically empty. I think the balance was struck here, and it is certainly my favorite design of the bunch.

Once again folks we have come to the end of another Kit Post. Like I said up top, I thought I had another two or three months to work on this, and with all the other work I’ve been doing lately, I was worried that I wouldn’t have the juice to get through this one on such short notice.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or other idea you might have on twitter, and if you like my work, as always – please check out my commission page for pricing and what to expect, as well as some of my recent designs.

Cheers, everyone!

Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

Kit Nerd Special – Newcastle United

22 May, 2020 Niamh

Skip to the next drop-cap paragraph if you don’t care about my background or opinions on the 2020 takeover.

To my usual readers – friends and family folks – it’d probably come as no surprise that I have a great deal of enthusiasm for Newcastle United, a football club based in the North East of England, on the River Tyne. In February and March of 2019, I took a trip to Newcastle (as well as Glasgow and Kendal) and managed to catch two Newcastle games (both two-nill games in our favor: Huddersfield and Burnley), my first in-person after starting to support the team since 2007.

I often get asked “why?”. Why Newcastle? It probably would’ve made more sense in the late 90s, when Newcastle was riding high, but in the late 00s the team was already having issues and the sale of the club from Sir John Hall to Mike Ashley (on the very year I started supporting the club) has proven over the last 13 years to be completely disastrous, marked by an utter lack of ambition and two relegations, as well as hemorrhaging any talent we did manage to attract.

In 2007 I was a freshmen at Purdue University and making a lot of new friends. Supporting football almost always meant English football. I was already a fan of the German national team and flirted with supporting FC Bayern-München (though my eventual German love became and remains FC St. Pauli), but Bundesliga was harder to find on TV back then. Plus if you weren’t supporting an EPL team, there wasn’t much room for actual talk and banter with other folks outside of European competitions.

So, I needed an EPL club. And being me it wasn’t going to be as easy as picking one from the top five or being pressured by my peers into supporting their team just for the camaraderie. I wanted a team to call my own, that spoke to me and the person I was.

For me, Newcastle reminded me of my then-home, Cleveland. It was post-industrial. On a body of water. Far from what was considered “important”. A far-cry from its heyday. And the sports? The sports were suffering, but the fans were die-hard, loyal, and had a certain sense of humor about them. It was this spirit that drew me to Newcastle United, a spirit that has persisted to this day, drawing me closer and closer to the team.

And now, in the last few days of May, 2020 – it seems to be over.

Mike Ashley is, almost certainly, done with Newcastle United. After 13 years of milking the club as nothing more than a billboard to hold Sports Direct signs, it appears that a consortium backed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, is on the brink of making Newcastle United the one of, if not the, wealthiest club on the planet.

Which, of course, has brought its own confusions, thoughts, and opinions. I have many of them, I’ve shared them with folks as prompted, but mostly haven’t outside of a few twitter posts and a few posts on r/NUFC, the Newcastle United subreddit. I am very much anti-Mike Ashley. I am glad to be seeing the back of him and hope the door hits him where biology splits him. I hope he buys the Mackems and I hope he completely fucks that up too.

But it is just our luck that we’re trading the unmotivated and apparently skittish cockney bastard for PIF, which through various deals and purchases, has tried desperately and often wildly successfully to cover for the crimes of Saudi Arabia through “sportswashing” or, to put it as flatly as possible, projecting Saudi Arabia’s image to the West as one in the same while also going through the tried and true motions of bread and circus for its own people.

The situation is one I’d rather not be in, to be frank. I agree largely with both sides. I don’t support PIF. I don’t support Saudi Arabia. I hate Mike Ashley and I do support Newcastle United. I think it is wrong for outsiders to think the Geordies support Saudi Arabia because they refuse to be turned off from their club, a club that is very dear to them in many ways I think Americans especially do not understand. I think there is also a minority of folks, either in bad faith or for whatever reason, need to lay off and stop acting like PIF is bloodless. Especially when it comes to attack victims of Saudi Arabia.

In many ways, Newcastle is my non-strings attached sports team. I don’t really interest myself in the politicking around the team. This, of course, is in stark contrast to my love of Detroit City FC and FC. St. Pauli, both heavily politically left teams. That said, I plan to take the future one season at a time. I suspect those first few seasons will be something grand. The wins. The big names. The expectations. They will all build. And so too will Newcastle’s support here in the US. I guess, succinctly, I expect my love of Newcastle to evolve over the next few years as its popularity grows and other people actually form opinions about them. Opinions they will then share with me, whether I want to hear them or not.

Only time will tell.

So. That was a lot of words. It was written basically in one take over my lunch break. leading into Memorial Day Weekend, a time that would usually mean sports and celebration in the United States, but is currently rainy and probably going to get hot, and then thunderstormy.

Oh. And there’s a crazy pandemic going on and it’s been a load of fun. I swear.

Once a year I do a post where I theorize and conjure some kits for Detroit City FC. I call it my “kit nerd” post. One team I’ve actually never done a design for is Newcastle United. I couldn’t tell you why. I love Newcastle’s kits, and I have extremely strong opinions on them:

The tops should be primarily black
More, thinner stripes rather than fewer, thicker stripes
Stripes should be spaced evenly
The white space should be the same width as the stripes
Shorts and socks should always be black
Blue should be either used as an accent, or not used at all
If there’s no blue accent, the numbers on the back should be red
Stripes should be front and back, and on the sleeves
If you can make the socks hooped, you should

These are just off the top of my head. And with those opinions, I wanted to create three designs (as I usually do for Detroit City): a home kit, an away kit, and a clash or alternate kit.

Some other last thoughts before I just pull the trigger and do that damn thing: I kept Fun88 as sponsor because I don’t really care that a lot of folks have been throwing various Saudi Arabian logos and companies on there. Fun88 is the current sponsor, that’s who I used. I also don’t do real-life manufacturers. They all suck, and these are my designs anyway.

Lastly, my main source for historical kit designs remains Historical Football Kits over at http://www.historicalkits.co.uk/. They are an extremely valuable source, and I thank them for the work they do.

Let’s get to it.

Theoretical 2020-2021 Newcastle United FC home kit

I wanted a kit that would invoke one of my all-time favorite Newcastle kits, a recent one, the 2017-2018 kits. What a great kit. Clean, simple big-ass red numbers on the back. It’s really gorgeous. It’s been followed by two of my least favorite home kits. 2018-2019 had too much white and I hated every second of the white socks, and 2019-2020 with it’s one, dorky stripe in the middle with black sides.

But there was a little tweak I wanted to make, blue. Knowing where I was heading with the away and alternate kits, I wanted to bring that splash of sky blue to this kit in subtle piping on the sides, sorts, socks, and sleeves.

For me, this would be a quintessential Newcastle kit. Unmistakable for anyone else. If you’re a regular here and you’re wondering why I always have more to say about away and alt kits than my home designs, this is why. A home kit shouldn’t need explanation. If you’re explaining your home kit, you fucked up.

Theoretical 2020-2021 Newcastle United FC away kit

When coming up with an away and alternate kits, I like the idea of going back in history. Taking something from deep in the club’s DNA or history, and in this case elevate something that struck a chord with the fans. In 2014-2015 Newcastle United wore a “4th” kit for exactly one game, a replica of a kit Newcastle wore from 1914 to 1930 as their change (albeit with dark shorts). I wanted to go ahead and make that kit the change.

To counteract all the plainness in the white and black, I called upon gold in very limited use to unify the design with the sponsor, without going heavy on a color like blue, which I used on the home kit. For this reason, I actually switched the ribbon on the crest to silver, as it was with the 125th Anniversary kit, so there’s no blue anywhere but in the banner on top of the castle in the crest. To round off the design, I chose to use the socks that appeared on a number of Newcastle kits from 1958 to 1961 – white with striped turnovers.

Theoretical 2020-2021 Newcastle United FC clash or alternate kit

This is another kit based in history. Early history. Pre-history, even. It’s also why I wanted to go heavy on the blue for the home kit. One of my favorite little tidbits about Newcastle United is that the striped kits, the kits that have literally defined the club visually for well over a century, is that they were originally change kits, loaned to us when we clashed with another side. I love that, and I love when the club makes little call backs or in the case of 1995-1996 and 2018-2019, we readopt an older kit as an away kit (in this case a red and black hooped kit from 1881 as a maroon and navy hooped kit with cream-colored shorts).

Here I’m taking the top from 1886-1889 home kits and the shorts/socks of the 1881 kit to create something completely different. Black, red, gold are three amazing colors and they always play so well with one another. And once again, I have dropped the blue entirely, even from the crest, to let these colors really shine.

The collar is half-and-half as well, with the colors opposite the main body, and trimmed in gold to further emphasize the split. Very minimal use of the gold elsewhere, it’s completely gone from the shorts and the socks. For me, this was to help the sponsor feel more incorporated with the rest of the shirt.

Anyway, that’s all I wrote for this one. I hope everyone enjoyed the designs, maybe it answered some questions you might’ve had for me regarding the Newcastle takeover and other stuff.

If you liked the designs, feel free to follow me here or on twitter where I’d love to hear your thoughts on these designs. Tell me what you liked, what you’d’ve done different. And if you’re looking for some designs to be made of your own, I am actually available as either a quick sketch-up designer or a consultant. You can read more about that on my kit design commission page with details such as pricing and what I expect from commissioners.

Cheers!

Detroit City FC, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Kit Post – 2020

15 November, 2019 Niamh

This is a bit delayed what with so much more Detroit City than we’ve ever had before. This is the sixth Kit Post and it’s the closest to it’s actual year, though I am unsure if Detroit get’s its new kits before the Spring session of NISA or before the premier of our women’s (!!!) team in the summer. Or, alternatively, after the women’s season and before the start of the 2020/21 season of NISA.

If I had to guess, it’d be option number three. Anyway, let’s cut the chaff and get to this, shall we?

For the uninitiated every year after the DCFC season ends, I write up a review of the previous kits (or current as it might very well be) and draw up some potential designs for the upcoming season (hence the title being a year in the future).

The post from previous years can be found here:

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

First, for the interested, you can actually see a wiki-fied list of Detroit City’s kits in as many combinations as I could remember. If you know of any other combinations, let me know! Especially if you have photographic evidence. I’d love to build a robust list. Some of the designs are not quite up to snuff, but I’d like to fix that in my free time over the next year.

So we didn’t go all out with our home kits, as I “predicted”, rather quite the opposite – DCFC returned to the dark purply maroon with a simple, clean kit with the dark red used in the piping elements on all three (the socks I’m not 100% about, tbh) pieces of the kit. Initially I think this caused a bit of a stir after a number of years of more complicated kits. The last time we wore plain kits were the much more off-the-shelf Nike kits of 2016.

The away kits were certainly a thing, though. White bodied and red sleeved, they used the red in the piping and after a humorous mistake by Toledo, appeared in the “Kit Man Moi combination” using the red shorts and socks in order to prevent a clash. These were certainly a thing to behold, beautiful even, in their simplicity without just being plain white. I loved the look personally, even though I didn’t get one from the store.

Lastly, this is the first time Detroit City has ever had a true “alternate” kit, and boy were they better than anyone could ever imagine. Pure black with gold piping. What a marvelous look for the club and I’m so happy they got to be used more than once. The boys in rouge looked absolutely stunning in black.

With three solid hits, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine what could be next. And that isn’t just a remark about kits, that’s also a remark about everything. The season was spectacular. Top of the table, Midwest finals, Members Cup champion. Our new Gaffa created a powerful side that played well and looked like a cohesive team, something I think was sorely missing the last few seasons.

But let’s give it a try anyway, shall we?

Anyway, the usual disclaimers before we continue:

I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official or necessarily endorsed by our front office
The reality of 2020 might be very different than what I predict here, I love the challenge regardless

First things first.

Hummel?

Or Adidas?

Obviously for my kits it doesn’t matter, but for the unaware, NISA has signed a preferred supplier deal with Danish kit maker Hummel. This deal, as far as this writer is aware, basically gives teams access to cheaper, customizable kits from a supplier large enough to handle the quantities needed while allowing other teams to choose other suppliers if so desired.

Here’s the thing. I like Adidas, but I also understand that they are expensive and that their recent batch of templates leave a lot to be desired, especially in an era where even most small suppliers offer full sublimation of kits at a fraction of the cost of Adidas’ prices. A savings which can hopefully bring kit costs back to a more reasonable $50 or $60.

Hummel also was a leader in the sport hijab business as the main supplier for the Afghan Women’s NT. We’d be partnered with a company that holds many of our ideals and has partnered with some big names.

I guess what I’m saying is – if DCFC ditches Adidas for Hummel, I won’t lose much sleep over it. And hopefully I can afford more kits, which isn’t that just swell?

Okay, moving on to the part that I’m sure you’re all actually interested in, my 2020 designs for the Detroit City FC kits.

The Home Kit

Despite some earlier comments on thinking of going 90s, I ended up retreating from that pretty quickly. My focus on neotraditional design is pretty incompatible with the variety of design that embodied the 90s in football and despite doing some research, I don’t think it’s an æsthetic I could replicate in the time frame I had set aside for this project.

Here I went with a rather clean design, focusing only on trim and small flourishes. I touched up the collar and cuffs with a dark maroon, small touches of gold. On the left shoulder, a gradient of fleurs de lys come down roughly in line with the crest and are echoed in the socks with a very faint pattern there as well as the two gold stripes.

I like the over-all feel of this kit, though it is not my favorite from the three this year. It’s simple without being plain; the elements like the fleurs and the gold flashes on the neck and cuffs given extra weight from a design that isn’t fighting itself for your attention.

The Away Kit

This was the first kit I finished this year and it’s arguably my favorite. There’s a different sort of feeling when you work on a home kit than an away kit an especially a clash/alternative kit.

When asking for ideas for the home kit, I got some suggestions for sure, but there were definitely some ideas where I thought to myself, “I’d rather not start a riot.” Home kits are sacred territory and making big, uncalled-for changes can get a certain reaction from a fan base.

Away kits, though, have a bit of leeway and I wanted to play with that leeway this year. This idea struck me while doing research on historicalkits.co.uk, Specifically I was looking at Hearts kits and I noticed the black socks with maroon and white hoops on many of their kits back in the teens through 1940s. The idea of combining those with a white and maroon hooped kit was too much to resist, so here we are.

The Clash/Alternative Kit

This final kit was going to be an important piece of the puzzle. Alternate kits are used to fill any gaps between the home and away kits when it comes to color. It is easy to see a situation where the rouge home and the white/rouge away kits are both ruled to be ‘clashing’ with another team’s, for example that’s what happened with the game against Toledo at Keyworth.

I think these pretty much fill the gaps.

It’s sort of a take on the alternates from this year with a pretty obvious tweak. We’ve done gold and white a number of times and it’s not a bad look, but black and gold look so damn good together, and it’d be true even if I wasn’t a Boilermaker. I followed New Balance and went with half-and-half socks, this time with a bit of a chance to transition from one to the other without looking like the sock was accidentally only dipped halfway into the dye. The crest is in alternate colors, this time majority gold with the statue in black.

The sash, probably the most prominent feature here, was actually a late addition, spurred on by the suggestion that the gold felt empty. I do think lighter colors are more at a risk of feeling empty than dark. Instead of fading normally, it actually pixelates out of existence as it goes up to the shoulder, which is what gave me the idea of making the fleurs de lys on the home kit fade out quickly going the opposite way.

They, in a way, echo each other.

So that’s all she wrote, my friends! Another annual Kit Nerd Post come and gone.

As always, I hope everyone enjoyed the read and loves the designs, if you have any comments feel free to reach out via twitter. I’d love to hear your thoughts or any other ideas you might have. If you’re interested in perhaps having me work on some kits for you, you can check out my kit design commission page with details such as pricing and what to expect.

I wish everyone a happy holidays and hope to be post more soon!

Cheers.

Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

Eleventh Warrior Appears

20 March, 2019 Niamh

A while ago, I posted a set of eleven kits for the eleven members of the still-to-be-renamed NPSLPro’s Founders Cup, which kicks off in August. The Founder’s Cup, for the uninitiated, is basically a trial run of the NPSLPro before the league actually kicks off and is divided into East and West divisions.

But before even the NPSL amateur season could kick off, there’s already been some changes with that original eleven line-up. Weeks after NISA gained (provisional?) tier 3 status, Cal United tucked and rolled from the group. While nothing official has been confirmed, there have been some rumblings of them and at least one other team some had tagged for NPSLPro-ship are realigning their interests with NISA rather than NPSLPro.

Suddenly, our eleven were down to ten… until a second eleventh appeared on the horizon: Napa Valley 1839 FC.

Napa 1839 is an interesting, if little head-cocking, addition to the line-up. When creating what is essentially a punk-rock soccer league, the wine-mum club seems to stand out a bit, but then again there are already a few clubs that might be wrecking the vibes for some people; Milwaukee and Phoenix especially.

I’ve actually designed kits for Napa in the past on my twitter account, which they kindly responded to. In my previous design, I went with a bottle green/primary, marlot/alternate set up. They actually seemed to take this into consideration and when their second kits were unveiled they were green/primary and a red/white combo for the alternate. So starting with that, I’ve come up with a set to join the other ten (plus one).

Napa Valley 1839 FC

For the home kits, I wanted to stick with the two-tone green combo that’s on Napa’s crest, which is one of my favorite in the NPSL. I know that it’s a little cheesy, but the Napa Valley front office seems to have a good sense of humor about it all, which I can respect. Hopefully they get that my “mummy’s chalkboard art” aesthetic above comes from a place of brotherly love and not malice. The other thing I wanted to do with both the primary and secondary kits was give it a watermark look using a sublimation process – here it’s some grapevine art picked up from Freepik. Accreditation done, the secondary goes to that red/white combo that Napa is already using, and reduces the water marking to just the shorts and the left shoulder, just off the crest.

So that gets us caught back up on the eleven teams in the Founders Cup. Welcome Napa Valley to the family. I look forward to the chance to beat you and then share a lovely Chardonnay.

Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Founders Cup – Eleven Warriors Assemble

27 December, 2018 Niamh

Happy Holidays, everyone.

I hope everyone has been enjoying at least a few days off, or if you haven’t, that your days have been slow enough to be at least a little regenerative.

Been a pretty low-key vacation time for me. Writing has been put on a back-burner for a while as I recover my creative reserves and what better way to recover one’s creative reserves than other creative projects you’ve been knocking around in the noggin for a month or so?

Not long ago, Detroit City and ten other clubs announced the long-anticipated NPSL Founders Cup. These eleven clubs have elected to go pro for a bit of a pace lap before a fuller professional league kicks off in the 2020 season. The list of clubs included some no-duh clubs like Cosmos, Detroit City, and Chattanooga as well as some surprises like Albion SC, Torrent, and Miami United. I was actually surprised at some missing names, but they might be aiming more at 2020 than 2019.

So eleven teams total, split into East (6) and West (5) divisions. As far as I am aware right now they will only play within their group with no idea if there will be a EvW Champion match.

What better way to keep people going in these long dark days while we wait for some announcement than to make some unofficial home/away kits for all eleven teams?

None.

None ways.

So here we go folks, strap in!

NPSL Founders Cup – EAST

Chattanooga Football Club

For our friends in Tennessee, I went with a pretty standard home kit, focusing on the dark/light contrast in the blue of their crest. I know in the past they’ve had some interesting takes on these, but I wanted to come back to basics for at least a season. For their aways, I looked at some recent kits they’ve used and went with a contrasting white/yellow get-up with a full collar. The small touch of sky blue in the collar works well breaking up the top of the kit.

Detroit City Football Club

I know that I already did Detroit City recently, but I am always excited to give it another shot. I spoke a bit with the FO about next season’s kits, and I’ll keep it under wraps, mostly because you all know how much they love fucking with me.

Mr. Wright, if you’re reading. Here. Order these.

Anyway, for the homes I went a little out of the usual comfort zone for a plain rouge kit with darker accents, framed in gold. Generally DCFC home kits are pure rouge with two-tone touches. The away kit is white with some rouge touches to keep it from falling into an overly plain hell. The pinstriping is a nice touch, I think, and creates a look that is pretty unique in our history.

Miami Football Club

Miami FC are an interesting kit team because their home kit colors aren’t the same shades as their crest. It creates a unique look with a lot of possible variations. In the past they’ve used orange socks, but here I went with sky blue and orange stripes. The away kit, though, does take on the crest colors with only a tiny touch of the sky blue in the pipe cuffing of the sleeves.

Miami United Football Club

Miami United FC was one of those clubs that surprised me in the announcements, however I love working with their neon color scheme which is one of my favorites in soccer anywhere. I actually toned it down from their current rugby-styled tri-color hoops, which are chef kiss amazing. Here I tried out my new henley template and tried to keep them as far from the other Miami in look as I possibly could. Home went high-contrast, and the away took on a traditional European look that shouldn’t be unfamiliar if you read this year’s kit day post.

Milwaukee Torrent

Milwaukee Torrent was another name that surprised me when I read it. Having traveled there two seasons ago, I wasn’t impressed with the turnout. The bar literally across the street hadn’t even heard of them, so… ramp up the marketing. Torrent have a very interesting silver and blue color scheme, and in 2018 not only did they use a half-and-half top, but half-and-half pants as well! Here I went with another rare look in the US: asymetrical stripes, then for home and away I stuck with the pattern but swapped the colors around. Changing out the blue for the white (instead of just swapping white for black) gives enough contrast to prevent clashing.

New York Cosmos

The Cosmos (long may they be fucked), are certainly the most storied of the clubs in the Founders Cup. I believe they’ve actually already unveiled their kits, but I hadn’t actually been paying much attention. As far as I am aware, both Inaria and myself came to the same conclusion – there’s too much blue in the NPSL Founders Cup. Instead of the normal blue, I went with green for the home kits, based on a design I did quite a while ago for the “Green Mountain Boys” of Vermont plus a small navy detail so it wasn’t devoid of navy. The aways are tied to the home with the navy collar, but otherwise are a simple top/shorts+socks contrast game.

NPSL Founders Cup – WEST

Albion Soccer Club San Diego

I’ve actually interacted with Albion before on twitter, when I remarked that their grey-colored crest was very interesting, and tried to design some kits around that color scheme. Their twitter account reached out to tell me that they actually had a traditional look that they used and I checked it out. Despite the chance for an interesting silver kit, I stuck with what I’ve seen of theirs so far. The home kits are red and white hoops paired with blue, which for the away kits I went with a Rangers-esque look, broken up with some red and white on the chest.

California Football Club

This was pretty hard, to be honest. Cal FC doesn’t have a crest, apparently. Or they really are going to go with the California flag with a soccer ball photoshopped onto it. I didn’t use that “crest” here. It was… well… it was a flag with a soccer ball shopped onto it. And the only thing I saw for them was a blue kit in their wikipedia page. So… I went with blue-white scheme, because there isn’t enough blue in the NPSL Founders Cup. For the aways I went with broken red hoops on white, with red socks as a nod back to the California flag.

California United Strikers Football Club

I have to admit that, like Miami United, California United’s neon-based color scheme rubs me in all the right ways. Not sure what everyone else thinks, but I love it. For the home kits I went white. White is a color that I often avoid when designing home kits, but I often use in away kits. I wanted to change that with a mostly white kit that relies on the cyan and black as flavor enhancers. The away kits, though, are certainly one that you’d expect from me. I didn’t want to copy the Miami United “color on black”, and instead went “black on color”.

Football Club Arizona

I’m really happy to hear that we have an Arizona team in the lineup as that might give a good reason to take Brigid out to her parent’s place and then for Ron and I to watch some soccer again. For their kits, I wanted to do two totally different co-equal “home” kits. First was FC Arizona’s more traditional-looking red and white kits, which is a favorite combo of mine. I wouldn’t want to take that away. Then, for the other kit, I wanted to go to the complete other end of the spectrum and do a busier kit in the modern sensibility. Gold-Red-Navy is a great combination, and given that Arizona’s flag is just that, why not translate it into a kit?

Oakland Roots Soccer Club

When the Oakland Roots first unveiled their crest on twitter it was met with equal parts of “What? No…” and “What? Yaaas.” I love it, personally. It isn’t a crest I would design or even want to design, but it’s like the DCFC crest of the Madison pink flamingo crest – it isn’t about working for everyone, it’s about working for the community around it. And that’s fantastic. I wanted to lean into that wild look for the home kit. I split the tree top and bottom and spread it out so the roots and their colors could rule over the chest and shoulders. Then the rest of the kit was nothing but color. For the away kits I wanted to focus on the roots themselves, in black, then combined that with touches of red.

So that wraps up all eleven teams in the NPSL Pro Founders Cup. There is a lot of great stuff to work with here, which is great. Rumor has it that the Nola Jesters will be joining too, adding a third neon-schemed team to the mix, so I am excited for that. Plus Cleveland SC and FC Buffalo rumored as well could mean the return of the Rust Belt Derby.

I’m excited for what the future offers here, there is a lot of “pros” to our punk-rock pro-league, but some cons as well. We face an uphill road, but I think Detroit City remains as level-headed as ever and we are in good company. This will be one of the most critical “fronts” in the Soccer Warz™, so regardless of where you are or who you root for, you’ll want to at least keep up-to-date on the Founders Cup in specific and the NPSL in general.

I hope you all enjoyed my designs and have a great rest of 2018. It’s been a tough year, but there’s a lot to look forward to in 2019.

Cheers, everyone!

Update 29th of December: Now with 100% less phallic imagery.

Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Soccer

Football from Scratch

29 November, 2018 Niamh

In a “two birds, one stone” sort of situation, celebrating both my thirtieth birthday and HAFC’s 12-2 victory late on Tuesday night, I wanted to write a bit about the genesis of the club from the perspective of the guy who’s almost really only done marketing/branding/kit work (which shouldn’t really be shocking to any of you).

So what is Harper’s Athletic Football Club (usually just “Harper’s” or more rarely “HAFC”)?

Harper’s is a co-ed, beer-league indoor/outdoor football (soccer) team that is comprised of about equal parts DCFC fanatics and not, who started off life as Whiskey in the Jar in the DCFL outdoor summer league which plays at historic Fort Wayne south of downtown.

I joined on the urging of several friends as a way to get more soccer in my life, actually start playing sports competitively, and as a way of staying healthy.

Between the summer and fall seasons there was a longer-than-usual break as Detroit City prepared to open the Fieldhouse (and then later, the Clubhouse). This would move DCFL indoors to the renovated facility. At this point the captain of Whiskey decided to look into a few new potential sponsors and a rebranding.

The Crest and “Harper’s” AFC

Being a sort-of, almost sports branding person, I basically took this as a chance to have a ton of fun and learn a lot about running the image of a team. I set out chasing down one potential sponsor which will pop up a lot in the following images. But despite that, it was pretty quick how we moved from them once another sponsor popped up.

The decisions between sponsors is a story that doesn’t necessarily belong here, or really anywhere. Both are fantastic. Both owners were generous and forward. Both are worth your patronage.

Originally, and in the spirit of the bar league, we were going to take the name of the bar that sponsored us, but with the coming Fieldhouse (and the attached bar, the Clubhouse) we knew that there might be multiple sponsors in our future. At that point was the genesis of a club with an actual name and thus a real identity.

The first mock up was pretty basic, a bumper filled with red beer with the name of a bar over it, here Little Tony’s, which is a favorite hang out of Brigid and me.

This is a prototype image, because I had never bought the actual image IIRC. Or if I did, I didn’t use it later. It might’ve actually been free, now that I’m thinking about it.

Anyway, it was eventually upgraded to this:

Which is a much better-looking glass and I most certainly have the right license too!

The reason for a red beer instead of more traditional black or yellow ones actually has to do with the kits, but it starts here with Little Tony’s. This bar is in an offset building on Mack Avenue that is green and black:

(Taken from the Little Tony’s Facebook)

I knew I wanted to use green and black as two of the primary colors of the club, and if they were going to be the primary colors, it was likely that the crest would involve both. Now, I could’ve gone with a green crest and a black beer, but I already had a sort of idea in mind so what I needed was contrast. The cream contrasted the black, and so to contrast the green I went with red.

So I threw together a very Germanic or even Celtic-inspired crest with an art deco font I had laying around (and again – the license to). I needed a sort of “name” to fit in there and rather than using Lorem Ipsum, mostly jokingly threw on the name of the other avenue I live near – Harper.

For those of you know don’t know, I live between Mack and Harper avenues literally on the line of Grosse Pointe Woods and Harper Woods. Many of the bigger, better teams in the DCFL (which play in the much more competitive “Neighborhoods” league) use the names of local neighborhoods. Harper Woods is oft forgotten, so eh?

I fully expected the name to be questioned and changed pretty quick to another part of Detroit proper or even just to something a bit more generic. To my surprise it stuck, which maybe I shouldn’t’ve been because it does roll off the tongue pretty well and I love that it has a human quality to it without also being easily gendered.

Plus my phone puts “Harper’s Ferry” and “Harper’s AFC” next to each other so… you know… fight the power.

“Athletic Football Club” also came from a desire to be outside the norm. “Football Club” is much more common, especially here in the States. Really it’s a tiny tweak, but it has some good consequences. It differentiates us and it the abbreviation is much more aesthetically pleasing to me: HAFC vs HFC. HAFC is a sports team, HFC is a TV channel that plays in the background of the dentist’s office.

The Folks in Hoops

This is probably the part everyone is waiting for. Obviously one of the things that appealed the most to me was being able to design distinct, perhaps even iconic kits for HAFC and then getting to actually make them. The thought of working with suppliers and designers, at the time, was super exciting. And to an extent, it still is, but it is much more… mundane? Mundane.

The first thing I did was sit down and collect my thoughts and asked a vital question. What makes a kit iconic?

What makes a kit that after hundreds of years of iteration can be put next to the first one and you go “oh yeah, I see that”. And really, what I found, is that it is a combination of sticking to your colors, sticking to a simple design that offers room for experimentation without losing the focus.

So the next question was, what are some iconic kits?

Newcastle. Celtic. Manchester United. Chelsea. Inter Milan. Barcelona.

This list could go on forever. But basic colors. Basic designs. Focus. A plain shirt is a design. It’s an aesthetic as much as any other decision. Hoops vs stripes. What color are your shorts? Your socks? Those can be easy to forget when doing this. Shorts and socks provide either more room for your color of choice, like with Liverpool. Or can provide contrast, like Manchester City.

If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend Historical Kits. which is a lovely archive of hundreds if not thousands of kits spanning more than 100 years of football history in England and Scotland. It’s an easy way to see (and also get lost in) the design of football kits.

But if you’ve been on this site even just once or paid attention to that crest I posted, you probably know where this is going – we’re going to hoops.

The crest and the kit were being iterated at the same time, but the hoops were first on the kit and then migrated to the crest to solidify the relationship, it’s also a bit of a nod to my favorite English team – Newcastle United, who have their stripes on their crest. I did think about vertical stripes, but the hoops are so much… better? Better is the wrong word, but it works here.

One club in particular I had in mind when picking colors and designs was Plymouth Argyle, a team I know literally nothing about other than over the last few years they’ve had several kits I nearly bought just to have lying around. Their colors are also include a beautiful shade of green and black and boy have they had some amazing kits:

(Image taken from PlymouthLive)

Their 2018/19 kit especially (far left above) is so gloriously fantastic that I might still buy one just to have. If only their season was going as well as those kits. They’d be in the PL before Christmas.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t even picked colors yet. Whiskey in the Jar (the team, not the bar) wore sky blue kits.

The shorts and socks were a mish-mash as only tops were made and I actually never even had one as I wore a sky blue Adidas training top. Originally I considered keeping to the sky blue and potentially doing hoops or stripes with that. But since we were on the prowl for a new sponsor, the idea to grab new colors was too strong and the green/black color combo is a favorite of mine, one that I’ve used a number of times in mock ups and world building scenarios.

This is a kit I designed as part of a failed project mentioned several times in the blog. You can tell it was pretty early in my ‘career’ as it uses the 3/4ers “hero” pose and things don’t line up as neatly or make much sense. Like the logo on the side of the shorts. The first iteration of the Harper’s kits was basically this translated to the front view:

I wanted to emphasize green with the hoops, rather than black, so instead of starting and ending with black, I started and ended with green. The sleeves line up with the shirt only in opposite colors, which gives it a cool effect, I think. Then, stealing directly from Plymouth, I threw on that sexy, sexy white collar. You can see the first iteration logo here. I think it mostly works, but it doesn’t have the charm of the circular ones to come.

Still with the older logo (the second iteration of the logo was something that really only lasted a day or two before being replaced, so it didn’t really end up on any mockups), I had a sort of serendipitous moment when I colored the sleeves white and liked the look of it so much I took another step back to let it soak in. That’s when I came up with this crazy idea – what if the top of the kits were white?

I applied a pattern I had laying around from another project (or recreated it) and got that rounded effect on top.

Side note – if you’ve ever worked with me and wonder why I can finish shit so quickly, it’s because A) I’m very familiar with my tools (I’ve been using PS since I was like 14), B) I have a very extensive knowledge of kits because there are great people like Högs, Eric, Roger, and others who always give me great tips when stuff pops up and C) I’ve got a very large portfolio made almost entirely of random ideas that I can quickly grab pieces off of. And also, when you pay for “15 minutes of work” you’re actually paying for 15 minutes of my time and all of the above. This shouldn’t need to be explained, but there’s a trend of devaluing artists and designers… but not the work they produce? Which is weird.

Anyway.

So, I get the designs all together (there is a corresponding away kit that has not and will not be made and isn’t being discussed here) and I send them over to our captain for review.

The review portion can always be nerve-wracking, even in situations where I maintain a large amount of control like this. It often leads to sitting next to gmail and refreshing.

What came from the review was: no collar, different sponsor. Plus at the time we were made aware that the custom socks could not be made, so we had to choose from some pre-made ones, we chose black.

I have one final check that I often like to do when working on more traditional designs like the one above. I open up my sandbox on wikipedia and I try to recreate the kit using only the default patterns for the kit and see if it captures the spirit of the design. Not necessarily 99% of it, or even really 90%. But the closer, the better.

It worked fantastically.

So there it is. The Harper’s AFC kit in all it’s finished glory. I’ve actually learned a lot about everything working on these. Including how to get those hooped socks, which some of us now have! There is a few things I’d improve with the finished (i.e. worn product) but for the most part they are amazing and I’m please to have worked on them.

We’re already looking into next year’s kits and we have some sexy new away kits on the wings ready to drop in the next few weeks.

Cheers, everyone!

Detroit City FC, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Soccer

The Kit Post – 2019

4 August, 2018 Niamh

Cheers and salutations to the fifth annual Kit Post! Five years of talking my head off in these Sisyphean attempts to further my clout and reach as a kit designer so that one day I may be sipping martinis with Cristiano Ronaldo while one of my kits barely contains his physique.

For those new to my site, whether you hate-watch it or I freshly picked you up during the 2018 Detroit City FC season, welcome! Every year in August I make a post about Detroit City FC’s kits from that season and then make some “predictions” on what we can look forward to next season.

If you’re interested in the previous four, you can find them here:

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018

Over the last several years, I’ve learned a lot about designing kits and how they are made. I’m not far from making the jump from “hobbyist” to “freelancer” and have actually had a few (three or four) false starts on that front. But each time I learn a bit more and come back a bit stronger. I’m also on the cusp of figuring out a way to just design kits and sell them, which I might experiment with. Things like my fantasy kits are probably the best place to start. So if you’re a fan of the Union Macenburgh kits, perhaps you should watch this site or my twitter for details.

My designs, I think, are significantly stronger than they were even a few short years ago. Partially because I’ve started using professional templates, but also because I’ve become better at translating the vision to the page. Still not great at logos. Not sure what I can do for that but keep working on it.

So let’s start with the 2018 Detroit City kits. I have some mixed opinions here and I actually managed to get a few things right:

Away kits used white socks with red flip-overs
We dropped Detroit Metro Chevy Dealers
I predicted the chevron for the home, we used them on the charity kits

Some things that I was completely wrong on:

I predicted we’d use the darker, purple-y maroon again for the home colors, we returned to just dark red
The away kits returned to white
I have *always* predicted a black charity kit, once again that proved not to be true (more on that in a bit)
We still didn’t pick up Stroh’s as the primary, but we did pick up Lyft; so welcome to the team Lyft
The Metro Chevy Dealers deal did not have multiple years left on it

Okay, but I got some hits! That’s better than nothing.

Last seasons kits can be ranked as thus: Away just barely hedges out Home, then a massive gulf in quality, the charity kits. If we were talking purely the tops it be a much closer race but… let’s just start there.

The charity kits, when first unveiled were already divisive. There’s the undercurrent of anti-blue in the DCFC fandom that is not surprising. Our biggest rivals all wear blue (Lansing, A2, GR, the Cavs… apparently), so for us to don it as well is not going to be well received. There’s some evidence that the FO is just trolling, but whatever. I liked the sky blue tops, I liked that they still incorporated touches of gold and the rouge chevrons. The problem was everything else. When they were unveiled, they were unveiled with the white shorts and socks. That looked good. Later in the season, I noticed that the white socks that had been worn at the unveiling were not the white socks we were using that season, so I put a vote up. People supported using the away socks or perhaps sky blue socks. What we got was so much worse: the home socks and the home shorts… for some reason. It looked like utter garbage, a very rare miss for our kits.

The home kits, on the other hand, were great. I really liked the subtle nod to Dave Edwardson’s hometown for what turned out to be his final season (apparently, as of writing). The vertical stripes of Newcastle looked good in the two-tone rouge. I prefer the hoops, if I’m honest, but I also like breaking up plain-looking kits. I’m thinking that next year we’ll return to a more plain look. I really hope we avoid the mess of patterns offered by Adidas for the upcoming season. Some are descent… but others are just… bad. Like snow flakes? Really? For fuck’s sake Adidas.

Finally, the away kits, which were absolutely stunning. Loved them. Didn’t grab one because I’m a clutz and I don’t want to ruin a $90 kit. The touches of rouge in the collar and on the cuffs was sublime. That’s how you do an all white kit… by not taking “all white” literally. A few teams in our league, including DCFC a few seasons ago have worn what are essentially bargin-bin white kits from Dick’s that have had the logos and sponsors ironed on. That’s good for a team that pulls fewer fans out per game than it concedes goals, but for DCFC you gotta be cutting edge. This year’s away kits? Italian chef finger kiss Divine.

Before we continue, I have a few disclaimers for readers:

I don’t work for the DCFC front office
The DCFC front office fucks with me
Kits shown here are not official direction
Logos, league, and sponsors are used without permission
Sponsors and league are not official or necessarily endorsed by our front office
The reality of 2019 might be very different than what I predict here

So we’re nearly a thousand words in by this point so you’re probably going, “Nick, just show us your fucking kits,” which I think is a rational response, so we’ll get the show on the road.

Last year I wanted to focus on the possible, that is to say I studied some of Adidas’ available templates and based my designs off those. This year I’m not sticking to that so much. I want kits that are both possible, but also are a bit more involved. So with the next three designs I have one that fits the “fully sublimated” design, the “easily available template” design, and another that falls in between. I liked mixing it up and I liked getting to do some more complicated things.

I have a feeling one or more of these designs might be a tad controversial, but we’ll see.

One last point to address before I get started is that I actually reached out for feedback and ideas and really I only got three: pink/black combo, “verdigris”, and for the sashes from the 2014 season to return. I’m only going to address one of those points here: pink/black. I just designed a pink/black kit for a client and so I was not necessarily keen on doing it again. I love the pink/black combination and I’ll certainly revisit it in the future, but the timing was off for me so it’ll wait. However, I do hope everyone enjoys the one I did make when it comes out in a couple months.

The Home Kit – Soul of Detroit

My 2019 Detroit City FC home kits feature the Detroit city flag sublimated onto the front in the two-tone rouge that has become a mainstay for our home kits in the last few years. For an added touch, I alternated the colors of the sleeves as well to give the traditional feel of a quartered kit, a pretty common design in Europe but very rare on this side of the Atlantic, especially in the US.

I have a love-hate relationship with sublimation. I feel that it’s often misused to create these vastly complicated designs instead of bringing a fresh take on older designs (like using the quarters to create the Detroit flag). Gold trim on the collar, shorts, sleeves, and socks bring the overall look together – an otherwise disjointed design framed and united. Not unlike the city itself.

With the constant war in US soccer on an increasing number of “fronts”, including Detroit and now Chattanooga, I wanted to make it perfectly clear what team is Detroit’s team.

The Away Kit – Heart of Detroit

The idea of bringing back the sash from the infamous “kitless” season of 2014 (which also gave us the hoops for the first time) has crossed my mind, but having it specifically called out when I requested input made it too much to avoid.

The sash itself is two-tone rouge, like the home kit, to give it a bit of dimension, and then “trimmed” in gold. The gold trim on the sleeves and shorts remains from the home kits, but the collar switches to rouge, not unlike the 2018 kits, and I kept the red flipover with white stripes for the socks.

A repeat of the 2014 and 2017 seasons would be fantastic, picking up this under-rated beauty would be a great place to start. That and picking up a certain WMB.

The Charity Kit – Spirit of Detroit

So the suggestion of “verdigris” was a fascinating one, certainly got my gears turning for possibilities. For the unaware, verdigris is the color of weathered copper… featured prominently on old statues like the Statue of Liberty and our own Spirit of Detroit, which has been featured on every single Detroit City FC kit from the very beginning.

I knew right away I wanted to go into one of those “traditional” kit designs that are not common in the United States. Originally I started with the quarters, but I quickly shelved this. It just didn’t click in my head, so I switched the the halved design thinking that I could add some smaller details in it to give it some life. Sublimation ideas crossed my mind, including the statue proper, but like I said the statue is on every kit and I didn’t want it to look like it was a larger crest sublimated over the entirety of the kit. I also considered some golden pin stripes, but again getting too complicated.

What I chose is what’s here: the gold collar and trim on the shorts, sleeves, and socks as well as the verdigris and white alternate logo. Sleeves alternate color like the home kit (or really the home kit picked it up from here as this was the first kit I worked on) with the YMCA as the charity sponsor. Between the two halves I applied a bit of a staggering design to give it a bit of needed life without over-complicating the entire design.

This is absolutely, hands down, my favorite of the three. The choice of verdigris as a color was amazing, it works brilliantly with the gold and white and is definitely being added to my dossier of color combinations for later. If I had to pick one kit, just one kit for DCFC to actually make real, no competition: it’s this one.

So that’s that! Kit Post 2019 has come and gone and we’re still under 2000 words!

I hope everyone enjoyed the little discussion today and I really hope everyone loves the designs. As always, keep your eyes on my twitter where I often post snippets of, or even full designs for kits and in the coming weeks definitely stay tuned for some big unveilings that I have planned.

And what do you guys want to see? What did you like, what didn’t you like from the 2018 Detroit City kits? Let me know!

Cheers, everyone!

Conlanging, Flags, Symbols, and Crests, Kits, Worldbuilding

The Making of a Fantasy Team

1 April, 2018 Niamh

Taldērszon, gamédunz!

I don’t often start my posts with conlang stuff, but I think today’s long-overdue post deserves it. Over this long break I decided to work on a project that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, specifically because it would combine my fantasy world, my conlang, some calligraphy, and of course soccer kits.

Well, technically hurling kits, but I digress.

For those who are new to the site, I dabble in fantasy writing; I’m currently about 3,000 words into book four with the intent to finish writing the drafts of the books before cleaning them up and publishing them one after the other sometime in the unknown future. One of things I like to do in my downtime is work on world building for the setting of my fantasy realm. This often involves long periods of working on nothing in particular but time wasters and stuff like that. But one thing I hit on a while ago was to do a fantasy World Cup, including all the participating nations and everything.

I got a lot of work done on that, but as I kept writing I didn’t like the idea that I was making much of the World Cup work invalid. So it became hard to focus on an eventually I gave up on it. Plus I found designing crests very difficult. I actually talked about this on a previous post and this is a similar post to that, the road one takes when working on a literal fantasy sports team. Regardless of the outcome, it was a lot of fun to work on and it definitely improved my design-sense when it came to soccer kits.

So, moving forward, I wanted a smaller-scale thing to work on. Something that was based in a part of the world that was decently fleshed out and unlikely to change too much – Hadyrland, the main setting for the books.

Makes sense, right?

Plus I’ve already worked on some conlanging and stuff, so I can make it truly fantastical. This is also something I’ve worked on in the past, though it was in the days before I got my PSD templates. The work even got me a nod from Azzurri, the Italian-based maker of kits. So that was awesome.

I’ve learned a lot since then, about how kits work and why there are design limits put on them. It gave me a lot to think about moving forward.

A recent-ish project you might’ve seen getting posted onto twitter were just huge dumps of Wikipedia-styled kits. I’m actually not done with them yet, but here’s the gist: five leagues of 20, 20, 22, 24, and 24 teams divided into four tiers, with the two 24-team leagues representing an East/West regional divide for low-tier teams.

Part of this was an off-shoot of another project I was working on to update my map of Hadyrland to be much more accurate and give me a better understanding of the human geography of the region. Accents, religion, income, population density. Part of that was adding the smaller towns and cities that surrounded large ones and that got me thinking about low-tier soccer.

So with the goal of making 110 teams, I set out.

I picked cities, names, years founded, tri-codes, colors, how many top-tier championships they had won, and even the “identity” of the club. Identities included political affiliations (including non-political and even anti-political), racial and religious affiliations, and in a few cases military-backed clubs. This really gave a sense for the world, the cities these people lived in, and what made them get up and go to a game in the morning.

The club that I wanted to work on was Union Macenburgh, which I mentioned in that previously linked post.

It was a club designed to have my heart from the get-go. A top-tier team that hadn’t given up its identity for fame, one that fed a huge Old Firm-styled rivalry with the big club across the river. It is the home club of one of my main POV characters and for a chapter in book two, we actually get to go to a game (though a game long before the rules were ever really codified outside of the local “understood” rules).

So I started at the base-level. What is “Union Macenburgh” in Hadysh?

Well, that was pretty easy – Macenburgh is “Moxn” in Hadysh. Union is “Opubfę”. Combining them it’s Opubfę Moxnd (with the “d” at the end sort of being like an ‘s in English).

Cool. That’s done.

Next was the crest.

I wanted to work with a monogram-style, much in the vein of the baseball work from last time. The crest is the club’s name abbreviated (OMd). I debated having the d as a superscript because it’s not really an initial (we’ll see this later), but I liked how it came out when it was at an even footing.

Hadysh is a unicase script, meaning there’s no upper or lower case letters. It’s heavily based on the Armenian and Georgian alphabets, which I think are truly beautiful. The influences from Armenian are much more apparent, with lots of u-looking glyphs.

This particular font is “Western Blackletter”, or a script that arose in the western part of Hadyrland (where Macenburgh is). It differs slightly from Eastern Runic forms and it’s decedent systems. I can make a whole post on that, and I probably will, but later.

Next I did the sponsor:

Here it is another abbreviation, this time for “Opubfę Acléęttaƥin ț Unħódna Moxnd” which means “Macenburgh Dockyard and Packing Union”. The though process here was even though this was a big team, it still pulled from local companies and groups for sponsorship, usually with a focus on manufacturing and labor, which is a vital part of both the club’s history and the city’s financial security. Macenburgh is a twin city with Blackwater Port, which the later being the more economically well-off and globally powerful. So if Blackwater Port is New York City, Macenburgh is New Jersey.

This also gets into a weird little tidbit about Hadysh: most conjunctions (like “and”) are single sounds. If the word following starts with a consonant, you add a vowel to the end, but you don’t write it, it’s implied. But that means the ampersand for Hadysh is just another letter on the keyboard, not hidden away above the 7, which is good because Hadysh has two numerical systems…

Anyway…

From that previous post on Hadysh hurling, Macenburgh’s main colors are maroon and gold and they generally wear hoops, which is usually, but not always, a marker for working-class teams.

The last bit was a bit of a slogan, one that if you’re a St. Pauli fan you might’ve seen.

Now for this I used the digital font I’ve been working on for a couple months now, so unfortunately there’s no scan document to show.

Get the easy bit out of the way, the lower bit is a name, “Ulēmad”. The top bit is what we’re interested in, “K̦o kémõ za ay͂a̋fa̋nyodda̋õs” – No Hurling for Fascists.

Ay͂a̋fa̋nyodda̋õs was an interesting word to come up with. Most, if not all, of the vocabulary I have thus far is not modern in sense of what words are available. I might have “cart” but I don’t have “bus”, I might have “pen” but I don’t have “computer”.

But the idea of “fascism” is a modern term so it required a lot of work, more than usual. First I needed to expand my fixes to include “ism” and “ist”. For the former, I used a modified instrumental case, dropping the object fix at the end and only keeping “a(~)-“. The ~ marks that the fix causes nasalization to the next consonant if that consonant can be nasalized. For “ist” I used “-daʊ̯”, which is the Hadysh fix for “-er” in English (e.g. Runner or builder).

The English for Fascism comes from the Latin fasces, the axe surrounded in a bundle of sticks. It was a symbol of the Roman legions and was co-opted by the Italian Fascists.

I didn’t necessarily want to get this deep (shocker, I know) into a project that was already ballooning out of control in size and scope.

To make a long story short the word breaks down into:

a(~) + ja̋f + a̋nyo + d + da̋ + õ + s

“ism” + “federation” + “nation” + genitive marker + -er + object marker + plural.

Yes, that means in Hadysh both “ism” and “ist” are going to appear in the same word. It’s just another quirk of an already quirky language.

After all that, or really, during, I worked back and forth, I got to work on some killer kits.

The home kits were pretty easy, rouge and hoops are like my calling cards, getting to use the gold was a huge plus, I was happy to not always be doing “shadow” hoops.

Awwwww yeah.

I am super pleased with how these turned out. The dual-tone of maroon and darker maroon. The sponsor in the middle was a bit of a sticking point, switching between white and the darker shade of maroon from the outside of the kit, in the end the darker shade just wasn’t legible even at this scale, so I had to switch to white, adding another color to the mix. Oh well, I think it is still clean enough to work well.

The shorts have the crest on the right pant (our left) and the player’s number (in this case “9”) on the other. I debated going with hooped socks, but I left it with just the flip over, a favorite of mine. Sleeve cuffs are hard to see, but they are the lighter shade of maroon with two gold bars through them. Breaks up an otherwise plain sleeve.

For the aways, I wanted to go for a simpler, old-fashioned look. On my league sheet, I had white kits with maroon cuffs, collar, and short bottoms. I basically planned to take that whole-sale but with a minor tweak or two.

Instead of white, I went with silver. And instead of plain, I brought back the hoops as shadows to tie it more closely with the kits above and the club’s history.

The outer edging was dropped, though, so the hoops run from side to side, top to bottom, with nothing in their way. Compare this to the home kit with the darker maroon framing the hoops on three sides. I dropped the two stripes on the cuff in favor of a solid color, and all the trim pieces are the same color as the logo, crest, and sponsor, giving the whole thing a very cohesive look. Clean, simple, classy.

Recently I’ve been doing more than just field players, I’ve wandered into the realm of keepers as well. And in the case of this project, much more into the rest of the kits as I did rear views as well, which had their own issues. Anyway, for the keeper kits, I try to go for the radical departure. For example, in my portfolio there’s a mockup for a non-existent “Grosse Pointe United” that uses blue/gold/white/black for the field players and carries that white/black over to the keeper kit only to replace the blue/gold with orange.

Here I went with green/white/black to compliment the maroon/gold/silver from above. It’s also important to note that these are the national colors of Hadyrland. On the left leg (right for us) the player number has been replaced with the branding logo. Otherwise it is a particularly “normal” kit for me. One difference is the gradient-shadow hoops in the green bits. They’re meant to be hardly noticeable, just a fine detail.

So it’s time to bring them all together and do a sort of mock-announcement. I know the next on right of a kit is sort of a thing I do, but in this case I didn’t have the time to do much else. I was thinking about trying to class it up, but how? Unfortunately my talents are still limited. Maybe in the future I can get some kits made and then shoot some “real” footage.

Ah well.

The labels under the kits read “home”, “away”, and “keeper’s”. The text in the upper right reads “Your 1423 OMD”. I liked the idea of having the crest as part of the statement, rather than above or below it.

So that wraps up this monster of a post. I hope everyone at least found it a tad less controversial than the last one. With the DCFC season picking up and my writing still flailing around, no idea when I can get updates on my actual books and stuff, or even make sure this gets updated more often than once a quarter.

Cheers, everyone.

N H Kendall

Category Archives: Flags, Symbols, and Crests

The Kit Post 2023

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The Kit Post 2022

The Home Kit

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The Kit Post 2021

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Kit Nerd Special – Newcastle United

The Kit Post – 2020

Eleventh Warrior Appears

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The Founders Cup – Eleven Warriors Assemble

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Football from Scratch

The Crest and “Harper’s” AFC

The Folks in Hoops

The Kit Post – 2019

The Making of a Fantasy Team

Home of writer, kit designer, and football-addict Niamh Kendall