UP IN THEM GUTS (named after one of my favorite albums from Planes Mistaken for Stars) is a series of blog posts where I do a deep dive into select projects. I cover the process from start to finish, so some may be longer than others. For more UP IN THEM GUTS posts, click here.
If you work in design long enough, you will eventually be tasked with either modifying someone else’s work, or matching the style of something previously created. Sometimes, it’s as easy as using the same font. Other times, it's more… complicated.
Fort Worth Vaqueros FC are celebrating ten years of providing the city of Fort Worth with one of the very few sports teams it can call its own. That is a huge accomplishment in the world of minor league sports, especially soccer. That said, I was tasked with not only creating a logo to use for all the 10-year events they have planned, but also logos for their free youth academy and the new youth club team they’re launching this year.
The 10-Year Logo
For their 10-year logo, they wanted something that matched their crest, which was created by Luna Design in San Antonio, TX (according to FW Business Press), in 2013. I’ve worked with the logo quite a bit over the years as is, but the only other time I’ve been asked to modify it is for the Vaqueros II team, which was supposed to gain momentum before the world stopped.
Looking at the original logo, I knew I wanted to pull elements from it to connect the two. I decided on the most recognizable element, the hat with horns, as well as the soccer ball. With the number 10 having the zero in it, it was ripe for replacing it with the ball.
Elements used from original design: hat/horns, soccer ball
This proved to be a challenging task, as its original shape was sliced with a vee to fit within the bottom of the crest. It was also comprised of a series of individual shapes so the negative space would be filled with the background color. I ended up having to duplicate, flip and sometimes create shapes to match, but we got there.
The progression from original shape to final of the ball/zero
the completed 10-year element
I was stoked on the final product of the 10-year graphic with the horns and hat with the addition of the bookended years. However, I knew it would need to fit within the original crest’s shape, so the journey continued.
For the years, I repurposed the shape that housed the VAQUEROS text, though it was a little tricky. I wanted to keep the arch, but split it into two boxes. The original design had a faux 3-D element, with the blue at an outward angle on the flanks. That said, I had to do a bit of trickery to get what I wanted.
Element pulled as inspiration
Faux 3-D element
The process went like this:
Create two boxes with the approximate width of the original outline (not the “Vaqueros” box).
Group the text and boxes together.
Give the whole shape an 18% arch.
Double-click into the group to grab just the text, then bump it upward to align better within each box.
Profit.
From there, I began the jigsaw process of putting everything together. As you can see by the image below, it was fun.
Putting the puzzle together
I cleared everything protruding from main blue shape, including the horns and 3-D arched box. I opted to rebuild from scratch because the year boxes were smaller than the shape supporting the original VAQUEROS text. I made a two blue rectangles spanning the length of the year boxes (with a but of an offset), and gave it the same percentage of arch.
After adding it to the main shape, I moved on to the Fort Worth skyline. Using the Shape Builder feature in Illustrator (shift+M), I highlighted both the yellow outline and skyline, then removed the parts of the skyline extending past the bottom of the vee. I also re-added the blue horns background.
It was time to place the hat/horn/10-year combo, and it was starting to really look good. The only thing left to do was remove the parts of the yellow bounding box that crossed the horns. To do that, I created a cyan box that covered the area I wanted to remove, then used the Shape Builder tool again to remove it.
After all was said and done, I added a rounded white offset to pop it off of whatever background it may go on, aaaaaand voila!
The YOUTH and ACADEMY Logos
The Youth and Academy logos were both easier and complicated, if that makes sense. I kept almost all of the original Vaqueros logo elements, but replaced the soccer ball with text. The main challenge? The Vaqueros text is not a font (it was custom created by the design firm). So, we got to build more text from scratch - SUPER!
Isolated original Vaqueros text
First, I isolated and analyzed the original text. The letters have a serif, though the larger “V’ and “S” didn’t have any bearing on what I needed to do.
Now let’s take a look at all the rectangles I used to build each word in outline mode (CMD+Y).
Bones of the letters
Shape Builder helped me create each letter. I could have used Pathfinder with each one individually, but with Shape Builder, I could work through all within the same motion. When creating complex shapes, whether by using Shape Builder, or Pathfinder, you’ll most likely run into an issue with anchor points. See below:
As you can see, the newly-created letters have several extraneous anchor points (the blue dots). They’re especially noticeable in the As, M and C. I also noticed by now that the O of YOUTH has a weird little artifact at the bottom-left corner. To fix these issues, there are a few options. If you have the Astute Graphics plugins (more expensive than free, but hiiiiighly recommended if you work in Illustrator a lot), Vector First Aid or Smart Remove Brush can help you get there. If not, or if you’re anal retentive like me, you may just go in with the Anchor Point Removal tool (-) and hit it point by point. For me, that’s the only way I truly know there’s only one point per angle change. This also saves time once you start curving corners or softening edges (which I did in the final product).
From here, we begin the rounding process. The O, U, C and D need their curves, and I went through and softened most of the edges as well. The final product before adding to the crests looks like this:
Outlines of the completed text
It was a piece of cake after that. I removed the soccer ball from the original Vaqueros logo, and dropped in the text. I gave it enough of an arch to mirror the box above, and filled the empty space with an upper-arched triangle with “FC” within it.
For placement, I wanted to retain the faux 3-D look that blue offers, so I made sure each logo had that space between the words and the yellow box. And we’re done!
This concludes our broadcast day… CLICK.
