A recent side-project for me, in conjunction with Les Motherby of Hull City Kits, has been The Football Kit Podcast.
It’s still early days, with the first episode focusing on an interview with Jürgen Rank of adidas, while the newest one, published last week, features a chat with Amilcare Elvo of Italian brand Zeus.
One of the questions we asked Amilcare was to what extent a newish brand has to be brash in its approach in order to draw attention and he provided an interesting response.
When a brand is young, it has to catch more eyes possible, so it is easy to have very aggressive designs, colors.
There is pressure, because if you do a clean and soft design, you are banal, if you do an eye-catching design you are overloading the kit. It depends from the perception that the fan has of the brand, and year by
year you can inculcate your brand style guides in the fans. But is not an easy job.This year, for example, we went very crazy with our clubs, and the comments went from “most beautiful shirt ever” to “the worst shirt I have ever seen”. But lots of websites have reported about our brand, and it is a great feedback for a small brand like us.
This isn’t to say, by the way, that Zeus can’t do plain and classy – take a look at the Salernitana centenary shirt, for example. By and large, my preference was generally for the solid looks with small design flouishes, but as I have gotten older I have come to appreciate more the work that goes into coming up with something fresh that also applies restraint.
To that end, the Zeus’s set of kits for Frosinone this season – designed by Amilcare – are magnificent, in my view. A gradient theme features across all three shirts, but it’s not the same pattern lazily applied to each one – instead, there is a considered approach with each shirt having its own unique layout. The watermark of the lion from the crest is also a nice incluision on the bottom left (as the wearer looks).
Extra marks go to Amilcare for retaining the motif on the two goalkeeper strips:
The overall effect ensures a strong, cohesive look and gives an unmistakeable identity regardless of which kit is in use. Credit to Zeus and to Frosinone for going along with them – as you’ll hear on the podcast, sometimes club presidents can be the bane of a designer’s life:
This is a formidable set. The only way I could think to improve upon them is to swap the pattern on the white and blue one ,so that the white has more white and less colour.