Football As Football

 

is a design exploration taking American football team logos & redesigning them as European soccer crests.

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THE PROJECT

Football As Football is a design exploration taking American football team logos and redesigning them in four European styles: German, English, Spanish, and Italian. The project was a collaboration with Alec Lindsey, Eric Drommerhausen, Bill Gunter, Nikki Meyers, Josh Vadnais, and Garrick Willhite. We launched the project in 2013 and it's now been viewed by over a million visitors.

THE PROCESS

We all studied different league design aesthetics and picked up on consistent themes – Spanish styles use a lot of shields and crowns, German crests are more simple and geometric, Italian crests use stars to indicate league wins and English styles are all over the place. We took these design themes and combined them with local state/city/team influences. We sometimes used state and city flags as visual cues for some crests. We used the American football team colors and mascots as references for making our "crest" versions.

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THE RESPONSE

The overwhelming positive reaction from fans of the project has been amazing. With one tweet from Grant Wahl, our website, took off. Deadspin published an article about us and within an hour we crashed three web servers. We had over 300,000 visitors within the first few hours of the website launching and that's with server outages. Today, we've had over a million website visitors from over 200 countries.

Our project was featured by WIRED Design, USA Today, Deadspin, Mashable, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, Brand New, The London Telegraph and The Atlantic (CityLab) to name a few. We licensed our crests for the NFL on FOX to use on their London football game broadcasts for the past three years. We get daily requests about the crests and messages of support from all around the world.

Skills

  • Identity Design
  • Visual Design System
  • Illustration
  • UI/UX Design
  • Web Development
  • Loving the Vikings
  • Football Fandom
  • Crest Obsessing

Details

Team
  • Garrick Willhite
  • Josh Vadnais
  • Alec Lindsey
  • Eric Drommerhausen
  • Bill Gunter
  • Nikki Meyers
Client
  • Ourselves
Project
  • Identity Design, Website Design & Development
Featured
  • WIRED, Rolling Stone, Mashable, Deadspin, Bleacher Report, BrandNew, The Atlantic, The Egotist, The London Telegraph, USA Today
Year
  • 2013