As it was the beginning of the season and training has just started our Coach Mrs. Sue asked the team who would like to design the kits and shirts for SAISA. Since my brother Jordan and I designed the boys SAISA football kit back in 2017-18 we thought it would be a suited for us if we tried for the boys SAISA volleyball team this year. In the end, we decided that Jordan and I would do the designing along with my teammate Luca.
Firstly, we needed to do some research. We mainly focused our time on finding what other schools volleyball team looked like and what were the conventions of a volleyball kit. The last year’s volleyball kit helped us visuals some of the key elements that needed to be incorporated with the new volleyball kit and shirts. Such as the school logo, the gecko logo, the Sri Lankan flag, and I also the school colors of blue, white, and red.
Since I already had the software (Illustrator) on my computer for designing all I needed was to find a designing template online. I asked Luca to do some sketches on some of the ideas he had on the kit and the normal shirts that we had to wear while traveling. For the normal shirt, he made a design which incorporated the school colors and the idea an outline of a person jumping for a spike in the middle of the shirt. When I first saw it, I knew we were going to use it however, we continued experimenting with the color of the background and the shadows it was creating. We originally started off with the background being white alongside that I made a black and maroon version to visualize other possible ideas as a whole.
For the playing kit, we made 2 designs. For the first design, I got the idea from a website that makes volleyball kits. I took the pattern of a volleyball kit and replaced it from the original black color to blue onto my software. So, at this point, the team kit had the gecko logo, Sri Lankan flag, school logo, name template on the back, and number. Luca created some sketch drawings for design #1 and we negotiated to what should have what and where things should be placed. The end result included that the side would have 3 stripes with the inner stripe being red and the outer white for both home and away kit. The name and number were blue for away and white for home, and the background blue for home and white for the away kit.
Our second design included similar elements to design #1 but was simplified. We needed to include the essentials like the school logos, Sri Lankan flag, and number/name however, this design had only a single stripe on the side which is red. It will follow the same color layout as design #1 with the home and away kit but I remembered Jordan and Luca wanted one of the designs to be simple, so that how it was kept.
The texts font in the kit and shirts had a mixture of Candara and Candara in italics with the font Century for the normal shirt likewise, the kit just used Candara.
After long hours of making and with constant negotiation we finally came up with the finished products. We had given the final designs to Mr. Turner to follow up with the manufactures and now all we needed was to agree as a team for what kit or shirt should be used.
In the end, Design #1 was the team kit and we kept with the original white background and a black outline of the person jumping with the school colors embedded inside the person as the normal shirt.