Afrocentric Athletics
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, Adobe Digital Editions
OVERVIEW
For this project, I wanted to shed light on black American athletes who either grew up playing for the city of Baltimore. This personal project meant a lot because, for a lot of these athletes, you see the struggles to the eventual success of these athletes. For many growing up these black athletes helped inspire the next generation of black athletes, from Muhamed Ali to what we have now. Through this project my goal was to make sure people came away with a better understanding and hopefully a fan of these athletes
Card Designs
Here are the final designs for the cards. These cards will act as trading cards and provide the user access to the interactive epub page of that said athlete. I found using a card to be interesting given it’s easy to print easily accessible and can be given out almost as booster packs. There is heavy inspiration from different trading cards mostly NFL and Baseball cards. On the front, we have the picture of that said athlete followed up by stats or fun facts on the back depending on what sport the athlete participates in. What makes these cards unique is the QR code here which gives the user access to the interactive epub page with a more formal description of the athlete highlight plays to check out and even a link to their Instagrams to easily follow up on these athletes to know exactly what they are doing.
Booster Pack Design/Mockup
For research purposes, the best way to distribute cards would be booster packs. From different media which includes the likes of Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game(TCG), Pokemon TCG, and Magic The Gathering TCG this is the main source of distribution. Since this is the first booster pack “Nevermore” was the name given to the famous poem “The Raven” from one of Balitmores greatest poets Edgar Allen Poe. Given the more dark undertones of the poem the background is more dark and sinister to reflect that. The font of Afrocentric Athletics is a traditional font that is used in African Cultures followed by Pan-African colors that represent the following, Red is the blood that unites all people of Black African ancestry and is shed for liberation; Black represents the people whose existence as a nation, affirmed by the existence of the flag; Green: the abundant and vibrant natural wealth of Africa, which is the motherland.
Billboard Design/Mockup
When creating a billboard given the many examples through different TCGs billboards are typically done in a similar concept of the to the booster pack. For this it is still similar to the “Nevermore” design but given the rectangular constraints some changes were made for it to fit properly. The biggest challenge here was keeping true to the original “Nevermore” Design while it still being able to be a billboard