SydneyCity

Definitely insightful: 

Re: the collar, a quick glimpse back to last season shows it was huge then as well. It just wasn’t noticed.

The big collars seen in pre-season may simply have been old stock combined with “we’ve already got them”, “It’s only pre-season, it doesn’t matter what we wear” and a fan base looking for things to talk about.

The kids shirt posted earlier in this thread, the same. An old, rushed batch.

Ironically, I think the push to get the shirts out early to increase sales has led to poor quality, which in turn has likely led to reduced sales.

Splat robin is just a f@!king stupid decision by someone in the club and has amplified the general dissatisfaction amongst fans.

4 hours ago, Ian M said:

Probably waiting until the day we sell Alex to bury the release given how well received the blue kit will be.

I don’t think it’s to bury it, I think it’s marketing related.

With all due respect to the other players, you want to shoot the advertising campaign with Alex Scott front and centre. If he’s sold the day after shooting, you need to go and reshoot it.

You also don’t want to focus on him, sell a tonne of shirts with Scott on the back as a result of the campaign, then have to deal with all those fans (justifiably) complaining that they spent all their hard earned cash on a shirt for a player that isn’t even at the club any more.

I’m not a huge fan of O’Neills as a brand, but to be fair to them, they have proved that they can turn kits around extremely quickly - albeit at the expense of quality. They do know what they’re doing and we can see with each iteration that the quality is improving. I’m increasingly thinking that the overall poor design/manufacturing decisions are being driven by the club. There’s no way that O’Neills would purposely release kits that damage their brand like this. If anything, I think they’re probably guilty of saying yes to many times to a “big” customer.

I would have loved it if it had extensively scanned OTIB and, based on all the posts, statistically determined that the answer to every Bristol City conversation was: “I only care if it’s on the official site”.

It will probably be a blue question mark… in Comic Sans.

4 hours ago, BasSavage88 said:

Is it even a proper embroidered badge or a bit oof ironed on plastic?

This is neither. If you look closely you can see that it’s been cut from somewhere else and placed on top. They used the polygon lasso, so you can see the straight edges where they cut it  - they didn’t even bother to  select it properly.
 

My educated guess is they enlarged it too as the black in their selection is lighter and more pixelated… that and the height of the badge is almost the width of the neck

2 hours ago, Bristol Rob said:

Maybe it's an ostrich special. 

I think we must have used all the neck material for the kit. This neck hole is smaller than the arm holes!

The thing that annoys me most about the terrible designs we churn out across the board, is that Bristol is one of the most creative packed cities in the world.

There are so many local artists and designers who would deliver a ridiculously high quality work for whatever brief you gave them.

At least he found something worth buying.

16 hours ago, 1960maaan said:

One of the best new kits IMO is Sao Paulo

I see your SP and raise you a Corinthians. Chosen by the fans, with “It’s the people’s team” written on the neck.

7 hours ago, Davefevs said:

Out of interest, what was the reaction at the time, when that replaced the coat of arms?

It wasn’t until about a month ago that I knew Bristol Rovers also used the coat of arms.

I moved house and the cafe up the road had an old “Esso Football Club Badges Sticker Collection” on display.

1 hour ago, Roe said:

I didn't even realise the splat actually is just a random stock image amazing

The stock image with Splat overlaid.

1 hour ago, handsofclay said:

the storekeeper opened a drawer full of badges and fetched out the Bristol City one for my mum to sew on. 

This perfectly illustrates part of the problem. If the storekeeper had opened the drawer and fetched a squashed robin, I would have said, “That’s not the Bristol City badge”.

3 hours ago, Ghost Rider said:

The state of that collar mind

48 minutes ago, Red Army 75 said:

Wrong thread 

Is that why the neck’s so big?

4 hours ago, Ian M said:

Inspired by Rangers right?

Definitely a lot of thought that went into the Rangers redesign (to be fair, there was a lot that went into ours as well... we simply threw it all away this season).

Designed by a lifelong fan. I'm sure it would have been a dream job: https://worldbranddesign.com/rangers-football-club-rebrand-by-see-saw-creative-and-craig-black/

O'neills have got a kit and training gear design tool on their site: https://icreate.oneills.com/soccer-menu-2-stripe.html

Someone send JL the link… or not.



 

Seconds out, round 2…

You've got the word Stoke with the O styled to look like Blockhouse park fort.

Year of foundation and in the football pattern, middle top you have the silhouette of your spiritual home - Stoke Bar and Grill - represented by that funny configuration of windows that was there underneath the triangular eave.

To be honest, I've never been to Plymouth, so this is all based off Google.

Here you go. The red circle "O" with two red stylised "D's" in side to spell ODD.

Flipped one of the D's to make a C and added the F.

Altogether, it looks like an odd wheel.

He’s a phenomenal manager with success every step of the way. Very clear in what he wants and very decisive in getting rid of those who aren’t pulling in that direction. Celtic’s football has been beautiful to watch the past couple of years. My prediction is he’ll lose the first handful of games as he beds in his style, then deliver great results.

1 hour ago, MarcusX said:

Saw someone at the weekend with an O'Neils rugby shirt and quality looked pretty good to be fair so it's in their wheelhouse.

 

It would be perfect if City and the Bears swapped suppliers. 
 

2 hours ago, GrahamC said:

Just noticed Partick Thistle are wearing O’Neills in their playoff games..

They delivered this beauty of a third kit for them, replete with tartan sporran shorts…

I’d imagine things went tits up in many unimaginable ways.

This likely manifested a scenario where the inability to deliver bespoke kits for the Man City game gave us the opportunity to null and void all contracts immediately, so we took it.

Things going tits up was likely very clear a long time before they actually did go tits up. O’Neills was probably being considered as a new supplier early in the tits up process (along with other manufacturers). When things did go tits up, O’Neills offered the best solution at that time, based on the clubs criteria at that time.

O’Neills are extremely competent kit manufacturers, but their core area of expertise is in providing kits for more utilitarian/physical sports. The material, design and (lack of) detailing on their kits - largely printing on one core fabric - reflects this. They’re not what is expected of a football kit.

No one wants to wear an O’Neills logo. It’s like when your mum bought you an item of school clothing that was technically a good, rational, grown-up choice… but you just knew everyone at school would take the piss out of you for wearing. The sort of situation where you end up with an unwanted nickname for the rest of your life (briefcase w*nker!).

The Hummel kits were things of beauty. The manufacturing of these kits, aligned to strong, unique, design concepts were unbelievable (the Ashton Gate 8 kit in particular - woven faces, cotton flags, embossed badges, printed text etc..)

Hummel enabled us to create custom kits. I imagine they had the footballing experience and expertise to translate our amateur design babblings into strong, coherent kits. They also had enough size/other clubs to rebuff our more nonsensical suggestions.

We’re probably quite a big footballing opportunity for O’Neills. They likely didn’t say no to our more nonsensical suggestions, and have more literally implemented our amateur design babblings (see slightly odd shade of yellow kit with a ten year old’s tracing of a stock image robin for a badge).

I actually wonder if us having some degree of creative control is a good thing. The flying robin is not to a professional standard, so it couldn’t have come from anyone but the club. It is atrociously bad. Even worse than the comic-sans inspired typeface on the training kit a few years back. I can say this with professional confidence.

Given the situation, the brief for all new kits should have been: “Don’t do anything stupid”. We did lots of stupid things.

I’d like to say we’ll learn a lesson from all of this with our next kit manufacturer… but I’ve been a City fan long enough to know that we won’t.

Anyway, that’s the way I see it in my currently very drunken state. I’ll likely see it the same way tomorrow when I’m sober, but I’ll be less verbose and just say: “Our kits are ******* terrible”.