Hockey Tactics Retrospective Part 1 1975-1986 - Book design
The idea for the cover was to go back in time and take a picture of a young hockey fan bedroom's floor in the late 1970s. The additional challenge was to include photos and references to the games described in the book without infringing copyright, maneuvering on the thin line of the "fair use" exception. A lot of prep work was actually finding and producing historical items using a combination of thrift shop finds, antique dealers inventory, stuff picked at the local sports cards shop and fake printed memorabilia.
Hockey Tactics Retrospective - Hockey sequences illustrations
Hockey analyst Jack Han writes about classic hockey games from 1975 to 1986. The hard part is illustrating hockey sequences without using actual game footage or photos because of copyrights. Common strategies are using circles and arrows on a "coachboard" or tracing over screen captions. Instead, our proposition was to create a full "model" including 3 scenes and a set of basic player postures, easily editable for team colors. The model also offer the advantage to be adapted to player's perspective instead of using the classic "broadcast" view which pictures the game from the crowd's perspective. Using universal coaching notations (i.e. wavy line = skating with puck), we can illustrate any game sequence in a short time with better understanding than screen captures or Xs and Os on a board.
