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This blog complements lovefootballhatefootball.com, showing the work that goes into a typical rebrand and giving the reader some insight into the mind of a designer.
Make Your Own Football Crest
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Designing crests is easier than you think. It's just about picking the right shapes, the right colours and the right imagery. The idea generating process is what takes the most time but when you know what you're doing the execution itself is quite easy.
I'm going to cover that execution process here with a few tips that could help beginners in design out a lot.
Step 1: Figuring out the colours
The logo I picked for this one was Championship side, Wolves. Their colours are primarily orange and black with a bit of white to use as a trim. You're going to preferably need three colours for this but two will do for some projects. I'm going to stick to three.
Step 2: Figuring out the shape
The reflect and pathfinder tools in Illustrator will be your best friends for this project. Everything will need to be symmetrical and the reflect tool will ensure that that's exactly how it stays. The pathfinder tool can do a lot of things but for this it'll mainly be used just to combined your reflected objects into one.
Create your shape using the pen tool. Then copy and paste on top (cmd + F). Go to Object > Transform > Reflect and reflect the image vertically.
Now you're going to get your second image mirrored to your first so just drag it out and line them up. Once that's done, go into your Pathfinder window and click Unite.
This is the base of your crest and so you should think about this one
carefully. I played around with a couple of different types of shapes but decided that a simple circle would do the job.
Step 3: Create depth with your colours
We're going to use our three colours now to create some depth to the base shape that you've settled on. Make your shape your primary colour so in my case I made it orange. Then select it, copy and paste on top (cmd + F) again. Change it to your secondary colour and move it to the back (cmd + shift + [). Holding the shift key drag it out to create a space to put your text. If you went with another shape this probably won't be necessary as the text will go on top so skip ahead.
Copy and paste on top, select your primary colour again and move this object to the back. Make sure the right object is still selected, then go to Effect > Path > Offset Path
Make sure the preview box is checked so you can play around with how big the border needs to be. Once you hit enter, go to Object > Expand Appearance to make the effect permanent.
Now you can play around with the borders a bit. I've added my tertiary white to it as well and ended up with this. If you went with another shape, you might end up with something like what's on the right.
Step 4: Adding text
Adding text for most shapes would be a pretty basic thing to do but it can get difficult when you're trying to get it around the circle.
So let's copy our white circle and paste on top. Expanding it a little to give the type some text to breathe. On the left hand toolbar, right click on the text tool and select Type on a Path. Now when you click on your new circle it'll allow you to type around it. This can get a little complicated if your text is lopsided.
Make sure you center the text and then drag the long blue line at the bottom of the picture up to the top to center your text. Then type what you need in. Duplicate the object and using the blue line again drag it to the inside.
We're almost done. All that's left to add is the imagery. This could be the most time consuming part fo the design depending on what your image is but Wolves' image is quite simple so using the pen tool I'll draw the wolf out.
After we draw out one side, just use the reflect tool to make sure everything stays symmetric. And we'll do the same with the eyes.
Finally, we group (cmd + G) together any similar individual elements. In my case the eyes are the only ones that need grouping. Then centrally align it using the Align box just to make sure everything is centered. You might notice a few things move around but they'll now be perfectly symmetrical.
And now we have our fully designed crest.
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