Wythenshawe FC Club Crest — Large-Format Print

The brief

Wythenshawe FC have been playing under the same crest since 1946 — a shield quartered with a timber-framed house, a lion, an eagle and stripes, flanked by a unicorn and a lion, over a ribbon carrying the year. The club needed it reproduced at full size on printed vinyl.

A crest is not a logo. Nobody at that club chose it in a branding workshop; they inherited it. Players whose grandparents watched them play have worn it. That changes what “close enough” means.

Why the gold is the whole job

Metallic golds are the most difficult colour to hold on a wide-format printer. There is no gold ink — it is built from yellow, magenta and black, and the working window between “brassy” and “muddy” is a few percent of ink density.

Worse, it only reveals itself at size. A gold that reads perfectly on an A4 proof can flatten out completely when it is a metre wide, because the eye judges a large flat area of colour against a completely different reference. So the proof goes out at full size, not on a desk printer.

What we did

• Redrew the artwork as vector where the supplied files needed it, so the shield’s fine internal detail — the timber framing, the eagle, the chain links on the unicorn’s collar — stayed crisp at scale instead of breaking into steps.
• Proofed the gold at full size before committing the run, and adjusted density rather than accepting the first pass.
• Printed on white vinyl and laminated it. The lamination is not optional on anything living outdoors in Manchester — it is what stops the reds and golds going flat after a couple of winters of rain and UV.

Why it matters beyond one club

Grassroots clubs run on volunteers and small budgets, and a lot of suppliers price accordingly — thin material, no lamination, artwork stretched from a low-resolution file somebody emailed in 2011. It looks fine in week one and tired by the end of the season.

A club that has lasted seventy-nine years should not be given the version that fades first.

Related service: Design & Artwork · Area covered: Wythenshawe