Free Association: A startup fashion label.

Football was facing challenges of sportswashing and hooliganism tarnishing the great game’s image, we identified a market opportunity by giving customers a sense of pride in a soccer outfit with a new aesthetic that is both expressive and also technically built for competitive play.

Results & impact

  • Season Magazine a trailblazing magazine in the fashion and soccer sphere declared Free Association the 'Best New Brand' of 2024. A resounding victory for innovation and style.

Client: Free Association

Time Frame: 6 Months

Duration : February 2020

Role: Creative Director

The football landscape

  • Football as a global game has become completely absorbed by major sports fashion labels and corporate sponsorship

  • Fans have limited options for individual expression and style. Team jerseys are often the garment of choice by most fans are labeled with corporate sponsorship.

  • The history of football is tainted with hooliganism and mob violence. Teams are owned by the ultra-rich who often come from nefarious states with questionable pasts

Sports washing

Exploitation and manipulation of macro sporting events to influence the reputation of owners or corporate sponsors

No Opportunites

Football fans who do not align or support these ideologies have limited fashion choices in displaying their allegiance to teams and love for the game.

Remote before Covid

With founders located in Perth, Montreal, and New York, our team was inherently remote from its inception. To overcome the inherent complexities of distributed work, we proactively adopted tools like video calls, Google Docs, Notion, and Miro boards. This early adoption, now standard practice, required a period of intensive learning and adaptation.

Capturing the hive mind

At the project's outset, we acknowledged the team's varied perspectives. We established a research and documentation process to consolidate our individual visual references. I was responsible for curating and categorizing these references into a user-friendly, organized system.

Our Process

Some of the organizing ideas, but there were hundreds more.

Branding Exercises

A series of branding exercised emphasized these themes further. A 20-year roadmap was useful for gaining insight into how each of us viewed the brand's longevity. The “what/how/why” gave further perceptions and engagement on brand direction.

Exploration into the competitive market placed us as outliers pushing the boundaries of androgynous and technical which we believed would foster customer self-actualization. These exercises laid the foundation and we learned that creativity and spontaneity should be pillars of the brand.

Understanding what we wanted to express.

Refining the mood boards.

I refined the mood boards further to identify and tease out a visual brand story. Embedded with countless reference points I created three possible projections to head with the brand.

Vintage Nostalgic

This refined moodboard was all about a revivification of disparate visual styles. Merging psychedelic artwork of the 60s with structured serif fonts and vintage photography from the 60s and mind-bending fonts from the 80’s. By time traveling through this distinct period and combining aesthetics, we would create the new.

Logical Evolving

Again I organized the reference images and synthesized them in a document. This mood board was something that the team gravitated toward. How do you become a garment brand that isn't just a logo? This method involves the creation of a branding system that stems from a reference point. For example, a grid serves as the foundation that the logo, website, and clothing structure permeate. But at all touchpoints, it points to and develops the universe of the brand. A feeling of exclusivity, of movement, and a philosophy.

Inclusive Technical

This was the most liked refinement, the one that had the most legs. This mood board talked about a utopic society as one that has stepped away from a world of patriarchy to a matriarchal one. We had the loose beginnings of a story. A society from the future looks at the past with an archival sensibility. The brand would tap into motifs that are inspired by Sci-fi. Including UI visuals and other visual tropes but flip it to be from a feminine perspective, accepting and progressive. Far away from the hooliganism world of today's football. We would give the consumer the future of society now.

Finding an anchor

At the same time, we performed naming exercises to find out how to call ourselves. After the branding refinement, we settled on Free Association. A name that spoke to our unusual arrangement where we would meet online from many different physical places in the world to share what we believed were progressive ideas. It also had a great historical reference to the first body of football: Association Football which was the governing body at the time, they also defined football and soccer. This had a great historical reference point, something that weaved into our story.

Final logo design

A flexible, adaptable form was chosen for the final logo design (below) to visually communicate the concept of free thinking and a new generation of mind-bending ideas.

The Free Association Brand Guidelines

Armed with a new name, logo, and a creative direction, I went ahead with creating a brand guideline that we could refer to when expressing ourselves outside of this tiny online group.

I decided the final guideline would be a combination of refinement 2 and 3. One with a system that was also future-focused as I wanted to create a design system that could be iterated on and evolve as we moved forward. I made myself a list of requirements and restrictions that served business and user needs:

  1. Be opulent and positive;

  2. Be ownable;

  3. Be recognizable and intuitive;

  4. Reference Science Fiction, but not green and dark;

  5. Have visual language consistency over social platforms and websites;

  6. Be modular with multiple purposes.

The new “FA System” needed to…

The Free Association brand guidelines

A story was hatched….

It begins with FAI, who is an altruistic AI who has traveled from a utopic future to our present time. She is on a mission to learn about football and makes inferences based on her observations. The future where she comes from has taken on the virtues of football such as sportsmanship and human excellence and integrated them into its very fabric of reality, extrapolating into how people interact and exist. As eons have passed the story of football itself has been lost to time. We the consumer are given downloads to FAI’s discoveries and creations based on its research and learning.