MORAL FIBRE
British football has had a dramatic facelift over the last decade and is verging on unrecognisable from the working class game that was created in the late 1800’s. During this process of commercialisation and consumption, the professionalisation of football has been operating in a moral vacuum, neglecting its true authenticity and dismantling traditional sentiment of ‘the people’s game’. In the relevant case studies it was seemingly visible that there was an overriding battle between two cultures; corporate and the working-class. This acts as an important metaphor depicting the unbalanced and soaring levels of inequality in British society. In my publication I wanted to capture this war of cultures through contrasting typography and layout of conversation. I have combined two separate typographic systems; Helvetica Neue (visually relating to a more modern, corporate strategy) and the serif typeface Fortescue Pro (depicting the sentimental and more traditional values of the game).
This distinctive contrast in typeface matched with the infrequent arrangements of imagery through photocopying has produced an unexpected and in some way uncomfortable result throughout the publication, visually resembling the unbalanced inequality in modern football. This slightly raw approach in layout has been elevated in the making of the publication. Certain pages are purposefully out of line and slightly obscure as the issues were systematically created by photocopying. This cheap production strategy is an attempt to capture the voice of ‘the everyman’, sharing similar characteristics with football’s fanzines and comic memorabilia of the past. In certain pages, this perhaps nostalgic and reflective way of designing that evolves throughout the publication is combated by a more modern approach. Through a more dedicated structural layout, typographic hierarchy and in some cases material and colour change, elements of the book share characteristics of a more sophisticated pamphlet. This distinctive change in style contributes to the overriding concept of the project, inevitably making the aesthetic an intriguing miss-match of ideas.
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