Futbol as Football Series: Balikesirspor

Futbol as Football Series: Balikesirspor from the TFF First League in Turkey.

We've had a few guests to the blog from Turkey over the past week or so and I chose to do a concept for a squad from the country's second tier.

Now, I was bit flummoxed on what to do for the football helmet. There isn't an animal, inanimate object or profession for the team's mascot. Their nicknames are Balkes and Balkesler  - or those from Balikesir. I didn't want to leave their lid absolutely blank!

Then it hit me to not reinvent the wheel!

The way the B and S are stylized on the original badge whilst kicking a ball is pretty neat. I took that same concept, changed the head circle to a helmet, added another arm holding a football and what you see on the left is my final result. 

It works. I used to do in stadium announcing for a semi-pro football team which interlocked an E and an I to form a Lion's head. I wasn't that their logo yet this symbol possibly could be used by a football team here in the States. 

Balikesirspor's current Futbol kit is made by the Turkish firm Lescon and my corollary for Football I decided on is Wilson. There aren't a multitude of Football uniform designers as there are Kit manufacturers (popularity of each sport, worldwide appeal of Futbol, etc.) and I didn't want to seach for toooooo long. Wilson has a quite a few templates to choose from and the shoulder stripes from Balikesirspor work with Wilson's Stripes template.  

On my "generic template" I went a bit overboard with the chest and back stripes. 

Yeah... I do that sometimes.

On my "Real World" template, I reduced the c&b stripes to just Chest/Neck marks and kept everything fairly simple. I kept the Harlequin design Balikesirspor uses for their fourth kit and I wonder if that could work on a club team or a Semi-Pro squad.

Fonts used: Numbers - QueenSquare, Name on Back - Night Train 382.