While out on a date with my lady, she came up with an awesome idea while we waited for our food. We both participate in an art group called Sketchbook Fightclub based out of San Antonio, TX, our town of origin. The premise is simple: challenge someone, one artist picks a topic, the other artist picks another, and then you both create a piece mashing the two topics. While competition can be fierce, I have certainly taken SBFC as a means to challenge myself and explore some ideas and topics I would normally stray from. So during our lunch date during one round, I chose fútbol, since we were watching the Brasil-Spain macth, and she chose type. Wow. What a great choice! I immediately had the idea of using the ball for the O, a common idea yet fun nonetheless. Game on!

I sketched out the above design using an atypical soccer ball as the O. I wanted to keep the type long and slender to offset the large weight the ball was going to provide.  This would help balance everything a bit better for myself. After our fun little game, I brought the sketch home to get the idea in vector as I was super excited to pop it in Illustrator and get to work! I created all the letters from scratch using the Rectangle tool, mostly. I then decided to change the ball all together to one used in Euro 2012. I kept the color scheme of my favorite World squad, Spain, highlighting the red and gold colors in the type itself and placed it on the blue backdrop of Barcelona. I kept it fairly clean and minimal in design, as some of the best soccer logos and jeresies are. I really wanted to give this design the feel that it can be seen on fútbol television or apparel graphics. Upon furthering my research during this posting, I noticed I had the accent symbol on the wrong letter (originally having it over the O).

Overall, this was such a fun time for me and it reminded me of how much I love type and how much of a blast you can have playing with letters. Using objects to represent letters is another wonderful part of typography and graphic design. I have a couple of other ideas from our date that day that I am eager to get into Illustrator and possibly onto a new tee for Awake and Movin'. So stay tuned for those upcoming designs. Thanks for reading and viewing!