Much of my early design work was coming up with ideas for t-shirts, rugby kits and gifts for family and friends. From there I’ve developed a real love of graphic design.
To start out, I taught myself various Photoshop and Illustrator techniques following online tutorials, or through simple trial and error.
As someone who has never been great at drawing or considered himself to be naturally artistic, graphic design was immediately gratifying and enjoyable, and I found more and more opportunities to play about with ideas.
Towards the end of 2018, a good friend of mine approached me about a charity endeavour he was planning.
Jim and I met through our rugby club when we were students longer ago than either of us care to remember.
Jim’s young niece was poorly, and he was helping the family to raise funds for her to travel abroad for new forms of treatment.
Our rugby club was to be the forum for Jim’s fundraiser he’d imagined to involve everything from raffles, memorabilia auctions and even a fashion show.
Jim had seen and worn many of the kit items I’d designed for the club teams, tours and various spin-off stag dos and other events, and asked me if I’d come up with some novel, interesting and unique items to sell and auction.
With a good idea of what our friends and teammates would be interested in, I set about coming up with some ideas.
I came up with a modified crest to commemorate the club’s 120th anniversary and arranged samples of sportswear that people would be able to order, with a hefty profit going to the cause.
For a special edition item, I hit upon an idea that celebrated the 120 years of our club with a limited edition shirt featuring a watermark design including the names of every player to captain the team from 1898 onwards.
Our club has developed a penchant for blazers in recent years, and I’ve always been partial to paisley, so I thought I’d try my hand at combing the two.
The result was something quite unique!
For the auction, I produced some one-of-a-kind classic rugby jerseys, combining our centivintennial logo, the club colours, and those of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Our club has a broad makeup of players from across the ‘home nations’ and with the fundraiser being held during the 6 Nations Rugby tournament, it seemed an ideal opportunity to draw on draw on national pride.
It certainly worked, and combined with some friendly oneupmanship, the five unique shirts raised nearly £1,000 on their own.