F.A.Premier League 20 Icons book scores for charity
Click above to view the full book featuring all 20 players chosen by the F.A Premier League.
For several years now the F.A.Premier League have taken anactive part in supporting Nordoff Robins, a charity established to help sickchildren and adults through music therapy covering over 50,000 music therapysessions every year in care homes, day centres, hospitals an schools.
Each year Nordoff Robins host the Football Extravaganza – anevent attended by the great and the good of football in support of thischarity. This year especially, the F.A.Premier League wanted to make a specialcommitment to coincide with the Premier League’s 20 seasons celebrations.
Working in association with Nordoff Robins and TheF.A.Premier League., Milton Keynes design agency Deep Red Creative andspecialist sports suppliers Sportsframe were commissioned to come up with aconcept to help with this special celebration.
What they came up with was a very specialised edition - Abook with a print run of just three and specifically for Nordoff Robins, whichwould then be auctioned at the event. The theme centred on the 20 seasons andwas dedicated to the 20 players and managers who had most influenced the Leagueover that time. Each individual had a spread dedicated to them with theirperformances and honours on one side, which was then personally messaged andsigned by the player or manager. A specially created image would then be designedto sit alongside.
Quickly, the Premier league and Nordoff Robins established aguest only committee to mull over who they felt best deserved to be in theelite list of 20 names.
Deep Red Creative set out to create the design of the bookitself and appointed Buckingham printers BCQ to work with them on thisprestigious project. BCQ proved invaluable in coming up with creative solutionsin terms of binding, cover stock and text pages. The cover would be buckrumcovered on a 600ml board with text pages on 160gsm Acquerello Avorio from Fedrigoni. The design element involved the players names being de-bossed into the linenwith the title ’Twenty icons’ and the Premier League 20 seasons logo goldfoiled above and below the names. Maltby’s Bookbinders based in Oxford wereentrusted with the production, binding and finishing of the book.
The race was then on to not only create the images but alsothe text pages. Time was a factor and the prospect of a finished book goingthrough so many hands to be signed by the 20 individuals was too much of alogistical nightmare to be considered. The solution was to print the pages as flat sheets and then rivet themas a mobile document which the players could then sign. With names such asDavid Beckham, Jose Mourinho, Cristiano Ronaldo, Thierry Henry and Eric Cantonaall out of the country the logistics of getting these sheets signed andreturned within the set deadline date was demanding to say the least. ThierryHenry spent some time kindly signing his batch, before setting off to New York,taking the pages with him! Nordoff Robins committee member and Sky Sportsreporter Geoff Shreeves was tasked with going to Madrid for the Mourinho andRonaldo signatures.
The preference was for the books to stay as consistent aspossible in terms of appearance which meant a request from F.A. Premier LeaguePlanning and Projects Director Peta Bistany that players and managers commit tothe same message with each of their pages. Conformity has never been part ofEric Cantona’s personality and he treated each page as his own personal canvaswith three original, but different messages and doodles.
The whole process of co-ordinating production schedules,arranging approvals of all statistics and signing off of proofs wasco-ordinated by Deep Red’s Account Director Sarah Mammatt and BCQ’s StuartCoote. The delivery and picking up of signed pages and their protection was tosay the least, a fairly stressful exercise!
In the mean time there was the small matter of producing 20separate player and manager images in the Deep Red studio. Creative DirectorDon Mammatt was tasked with creating the images and the strategy was to makethem the same but different! Don Mammatt explains.
“We knew that this was a collection so it would have beenwrong to have worked in a fashion where the images were too radically differentto each other, so we wanted to retain a general style and then where we felt itwas appropriate would look to inject elements of a players personality orcharacter. All the files were created in Adobe Photoshop and I’ve lost count ofthe elements of layers within each file and even the number of drafts createdas we just worked toward a solution we would be happy with. Part of the processis just shutting your eyes from what you’ve done for a couple of days beforegoing back in and asking yourself – ‘am I still going to happy with this in 6months time?’. Of course you can’t create something that will be universallyliked but it was important that we would be happy with it and in terms of the footballcommunity and of course the purchaser, that it best represented thoseindividuals.”
Ultimately between Deep Red and F.A.Premier League’s PetaBistany, approval and sign-off of all the images was achieved before the fileswere sent to BCQ for production and print.
Slowly but surely the project was coming together. Maltby’shad the right hand pages with all the individual images and the text pagescomplete with player messages and signatures. All apart from David Beckham’swhich had been delayed coming from Los Angeles. The schedule of the projectmeant any delay would have prevented the books being ready for delivery for theFootball Extravaganza event. Maltby’s took the decision to pre bind the bookand ultimately found a solution to the problem through a ‘tipping in’ processwhere the remaining page was glued in post production.
All 3 books complete with a specially designed and producedsleeve to the same finish and spec as the book covers, arrived at the Deep Redstudio in Milton Keynes a day before the big event.
To see more work from us, visit www.deepredcreative.com
Each year Nordoff Robins host the Football Extravaganza – anevent attended by the great and the good of football in support of thischarity. This year especially, the F.A.Premier League wanted to make a specialcommitment to coincide with the Premier League’s 20 seasons celebrations.
Working in association with Nordoff Robins and TheF.A.Premier League., Milton Keynes design agency Deep Red Creative andspecialist sports suppliers Sportsframe were commissioned to come up with aconcept to help with this special celebration.
What they came up with was a very specialised edition - Abook with a print run of just three and specifically for Nordoff Robins, whichwould then be auctioned at the event. The theme centred on the 20 seasons andwas dedicated to the 20 players and managers who had most influenced the Leagueover that time. Each individual had a spread dedicated to them with theirperformances and honours on one side, which was then personally messaged andsigned by the player or manager. A specially created image would then be designedto sit alongside.
Quickly, the Premier league and Nordoff Robins established aguest only committee to mull over who they felt best deserved to be in theelite list of 20 names.
Deep Red Creative set out to create the design of the bookitself and appointed Buckingham printers BCQ to work with them on thisprestigious project. BCQ proved invaluable in coming up with creative solutionsin terms of binding, cover stock and text pages. The cover would be buckrumcovered on a 600ml board with text pages on 160gsm Acquerello Avorio from Fedrigoni. The design element involved the players names being de-bossed into the linenwith the title ’Twenty icons’ and the Premier League 20 seasons logo goldfoiled above and below the names. Maltby’s Bookbinders based in Oxford wereentrusted with the production, binding and finishing of the book.
The race was then on to not only create the images but alsothe text pages. Time was a factor and the prospect of a finished book goingthrough so many hands to be signed by the 20 individuals was too much of alogistical nightmare to be considered. The solution was to print the pages as flat sheets and then rivet themas a mobile document which the players could then sign. With names such asDavid Beckham, Jose Mourinho, Cristiano Ronaldo, Thierry Henry and Eric Cantonaall out of the country the logistics of getting these sheets signed andreturned within the set deadline date was demanding to say the least. ThierryHenry spent some time kindly signing his batch, before setting off to New York,taking the pages with him! Nordoff Robins committee member and Sky Sportsreporter Geoff Shreeves was tasked with going to Madrid for the Mourinho andRonaldo signatures.
The preference was for the books to stay as consistent aspossible in terms of appearance which meant a request from F.A. Premier LeaguePlanning and Projects Director Peta Bistany that players and managers commit tothe same message with each of their pages. Conformity has never been part ofEric Cantona’s personality and he treated each page as his own personal canvaswith three original, but different messages and doodles.
The whole process of co-ordinating production schedules,arranging approvals of all statistics and signing off of proofs wasco-ordinated by Deep Red’s Account Director Sarah Mammatt and BCQ’s StuartCoote. The delivery and picking up of signed pages and their protection was tosay the least, a fairly stressful exercise!
In the mean time there was the small matter of producing 20separate player and manager images in the Deep Red studio. Creative DirectorDon Mammatt was tasked with creating the images and the strategy was to makethem the same but different! Don Mammatt explains.
“We knew that this was a collection so it would have beenwrong to have worked in a fashion where the images were too radically differentto each other, so we wanted to retain a general style and then where we felt itwas appropriate would look to inject elements of a players personality orcharacter. All the files were created in Adobe Photoshop and I’ve lost count ofthe elements of layers within each file and even the number of drafts createdas we just worked toward a solution we would be happy with. Part of the processis just shutting your eyes from what you’ve done for a couple of days beforegoing back in and asking yourself – ‘am I still going to happy with this in 6months time?’. Of course you can’t create something that will be universallyliked but it was important that we would be happy with it and in terms of the footballcommunity and of course the purchaser, that it best represented thoseindividuals.”
Ultimately between Deep Red and F.A.Premier League’s PetaBistany, approval and sign-off of all the images was achieved before the fileswere sent to BCQ for production and print.
Slowly but surely the project was coming together. Maltby’shad the right hand pages with all the individual images and the text pagescomplete with player messages and signatures. All apart from David Beckham’swhich had been delayed coming from Los Angeles. The schedule of the projectmeant any delay would have prevented the books being ready for delivery for theFootball Extravaganza event. Maltby’s took the decision to pre bind the bookand ultimately found a solution to the problem through a ‘tipping in’ processwhere the remaining page was glued in post production.
All 3 books complete with a specially designed and producedsleeve to the same finish and spec as the book covers, arrived at the Deep Redstudio in Milton Keynes a day before the big event.
To see more work from us, visit www.deepredcreative.com
The Football Extravaganza evening is a charity event but also a football event which including honouring those players who have made five hundred plus appearances in the Premier League together with specially invited top table of guests including Alan Shearer, Frank Lampard, Gary Neville and Graeme Souness.
Ultimately the books went to auction in front of over 1,000 guests at the Grosvenor House Hotel and neither the charity or those involved in its production could be disappointed with the results. All three books raised an incredible £30,000 each. All 20 images were also produced as a set of 20 canvases and these sold for £10,000 making the project as a whole £100,000 for the Nordoff Robins charity.
Ultimately the books went to auction in front of over 1,000 guests at the Grosvenor House Hotel and neither the charity or those involved in its production could be disappointed with the results. All three books raised an incredible £30,000 each. All 20 images were also produced as a set of 20 canvases and these sold for £10,000 making the project as a whole £100,000 for the Nordoff Robins charity.
