A good call before starting this is to see what's already out there and the kind of visual style I want to aim for. I want this to be more of a premium supplement, not in terms of price, it'll be more collectable and exclusive to certain stores such as the Village book-store in Leeds. Catering for the consumer interested in experimental and considered layouts with design sensibilities.
Below are examples of football magazines and match programmes I like for various reasons such as scale, colour palette, layout and communication.
The Good
I've highlighted these as I feel these have a much more considered layout than match programmes you might find these days with bold text, less emphasis on the players and more of a class and collectibility about them. The images are more considered and have less emphasis on layering players and sticking drop shadows and outer glows around them
West Brom 68
Arsenal '54-'55
Ajax '75-76
Arsenal '71-72
Arsenal '63-64
One of my favourites! Simple yet so bold.
You wouldn't see something like this now. Cheeky bit of helvetica
FA Cup '67
City v United '75
Portsmouth v Wolves '39
United v Derby '70
The Bad
Don't mean to sound like a hipster but it seems decent design kind of got lost through the years in terms of match programmes and I definitely wouldn't bother keeping any of these. This is the design style I want to steer away from.
This isn't the aesthetic style I want, won't go anywhere near it. I feel it creates a certain image of football I want to steer away from, it feels and looks cheap and tacky.
Existing Footy magazines
My magazine will differentiate itself from most magazines out there and market itself towards a specific audience to be more a coffee table magazine, rather than a throw-away magazine as a lot of football magazines are.
FourFourTwo is a stop-gap between cheap football magazines targeted at the younger schoolkid demographic and between high-end glossy coffee table magazines.
All these magazines target a certain demographic and probably are successful in doing so but they create quite a stereotypical, dare I say 'unintelligent' image of football fans with grungey and loud text with overcrowded front covers. Football fans are human like the rest of us and appreciate a nice bit of design too.
I feel in the past football magazines didn't feel the need to be so loud and the communication was more pure, like here...
Against the norm?
There are a few magazines out there which break the trend and have found success such as Howler magazine a US based glossy which has a highly illustrative and well designed approach to football coverage.
My magazine will most likely be a free supplement available on the stands at select football matches or maybe all. It will be inexpensive to produce and won't hold a vast amount of content but I aim for it to be clean, clear, experimental and a change from the usual stuff you'd receive. And also importantly, collectable.
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