A deep dive into the creative process around making this Fisher Classics art project.
Why Brutalism?
After doing a bit of mind-map about Carlton the word 'Brutal' kept on popping up.
We loved the idea of Carlton players as Brutalist buildings with their amazing nicknames as their titles.
This lead us to a bit of a deep dive on Brutalism. The movement in buildings was on the wane by the 1980's with many of them becoming considered too ugly and utilitarian.
Recently brutalism has had a resurgence in web and graphic design. This aesthetic as both old and new seemed to be perfect when looking at Carlton.
A series from the Guardian in 2014 piqued our interest; the players became brutalist buildings and the fonts were going to be modern and web based.
We were well on our way.
Why these colours?
The most obvious thing to do here was to use navy blue. These colours were a nod to the club being prepared to experiment with its clash jumper at times (remember the weird M&M's blue cross promotion?).
If you need evidence of the Baggers love of a sartorial experiment, here is a particularly weird Big Footy forum thread.
Through the research we found out that orange was an original colour on the Carlton lace up jumper. It's also been a colour deployed by teams as an additional web colour on websites in recent years.
Many Victorian rep sides use this orange to striking effect against its big white V and dark blue.
What about the textures?
Each texture used in these artworks was taken at Princes Park Stadium. During a practice game our artists photographed the concrete and wood textures of the aging brutalist stadium.
Their curiosity got them as far as the coaches box on the top level and awkwardly close to the visiting coach before doing a runner.
Why Italian?
As the format influence was in Italian it really didn't seem too much of a leap to title these artworks in Italian.
The narrative that we created here was that this set of posters had been created by Italian speakers to celebrate their Carlton heroes.
This was a bit of an extension of the sports magazine covers of the 1960's and 70's that celebrated famous European and South American Footballers.