DESIGN: Local athletes bring soccer to Buffalo

Starting in September 2009, my friend Nick Mendola asked if I could help him and co-owners Scott Frauenhofer and Ryan Knapp to create a logo for a soccer team that they were bringing to the area. A member of the National Premier Soccer League, FC Buffalo was born. It is a great organization that looks to really help expose the sport to Buffalonians and Western New Yorkers in general. As the site says, this squad will be “a mix of the area’s best amateur, collegiate and post-collegiate players suiting up in blue, gold and white for their city and sport”.

The design began with the desire to use a shield motif common in the game’s existing logos while mixing some aspect of Buffalo, whether the animal, symbols, or whatever else came to mind. One of the first requests was seeing what could be done with the City’s flag as the main design force—it stuck.

For more information and contact info for the team, please visit www.fcbuffalo.org.

Through this connection, December and January saw me working with Ryan Knapp on a couple more of his endeavors. The first was for buffalofutsal, an organization that “is dedicated to developing and expanding the game of futsal in Buffalo and Western New York. [They] provide all players the opportunity to participate in leagues, academies and tournaments. [They] strive to achieve the highest level of professionalism, the highest quality officiating and the overall best experience for all participants.”

The final design:

Along with this came a logo for the inner city portion, FreshKick Project, “a collaborative that provides resources to empower soccer as a vehicle of social change in urban communities”.

The final design:

For more information and contact info for buffalofutsal, please visit www.bflofutsal.com.

Mendola, Fraunhofer, and Knapp are really doing something here to help use soccer and athletics to help the community, especially the youth of the area. Please keep these organizations in mind for the future, whether for your own children to join or yourself to come out and enjoy a match. Any support you can give them would be fantastic.

side note:
With any design project, the final product is always a collaboration of ideas from myself as the designer and the client as the customer seeking a specific image. With this post, I also wanted to include a couple alternate versions that I liked.

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