During the winter of the pandemic, I started a passion project combining my two loves – design and football.
I started creating designs to keep my evenings busy and creative skills fresh, but quickly became motivated to keep producing content as the popularity of my pages and commissions grew. I developed a loyal following after sharing unique match week posters, phone screensavers, social media headers and desktop wallpapers.
This project allowed me to test out new tools and learn new ways of creating graphics. This personal project also ultimately developed my professional skills; not only in a graphic design sense, but I now have a better understanding of digital analytics and the impact of traction on social media.
Deliverables
- Social Media Headers
- iPhone Backgrounds
- Social Posts
Softwares
- Affinity Photo (iPad)
- ProCreate (iPad)
2,150,000
Twitter Project Impresions
12,800
Twitter Project Likes
1,700
Twitter Project Retweets
Organic Follower Engagement
As the majority of my career has been with a marketing team, I understand the importance of online algorithms and how they can organically promote content engagement.
I created graphics – such as the one to the right – with a call to create a ‘dream 5-a-side team’ to generate greater interaction within the West Ham online community.
I started this as a personal development project but was given a fascinating insight into online content engagement without paid promotion and ultimately, a great way to spend those long lockdown evenings!
Reactionary Design
I found that a great way to increase page visibility was reactionary graphics and a quick turnaround.
To the left, I have included my personal favourite example. West Ham Twitter went wild when Pep Guardiola won premier league manager of the season in May 2021; I created a tongue-in-cheek image depicting our manager of the year – Mr David Moyes. The reaction to this was huge and I began taking every opportunity to create a graphic that responded to transfer rumours, wins and losses and the hope that we might win a cup with captain Mark Noble.
