When You Love Fantasy Football a Little Too Much (the NCFA Yearbooks)
I grew up building my own sports leagues from scratch. Not just pretend teams: they all had brands, uniforms, and fake rosters. And I kept them neatly organized in a 3-ring binder. Each team had its own page with all the necessary visual assets. And when a new idea hit me? The league expanded. Unfortunately, my childhood creations were a casualty of all the moving around I did throughout college, otherwise, I'd be working on my own version of CJ Zilligen's UFL project.
It wasn't until many years later that I had the opportunity to do something similar. Let me introduce you to the NCFA: a college fantasy football league run on Chris Creamer’s Sports Logo Community.
When I joined the league in 2012, I had the idea to make this fantasy league the premier college fantasy league on the internet. Couple this with my passion for sports and publication design, and we have a super-fun, extensive side project that occupied my free time for about 6 months out of the two years we produced these books.
I started the 'media guide’ craze in 2013 with the NCFA's first-ever official media guide, and after seeing the tremendous support from both the design and fantasy sports community, I decided to head up our small moonlight design team of 3 and take the 2014 edition to the next level.
These books contain painstaking amounts of detail. Over 400 hours went into recreating league member-submitted uniforms and logo sets for their teams. Once those were input into our standardized vector templates, I jersey-swapped (read, Photoshopped) all of the players into their respective “new” jerseys. Here's a time lapse video of what that looks like:
At the end of the day, the final numbers were: 123 jerseys recreated, 39 jersey swaps, 72 stories written, 14 different kinds of cleats documented, and 205 pages of sheer college and fantasy football nirvana. You can read the online version on ISSUU, or buy one for your coffee table here.
Special thanks to Scott Springer and Chris Maurer for their time and dedication on these books.