Irish Powerchair Football

The Association of Irish Powerchair Football has been the governing body for the sport in Ireland since 2009, running the premier league, the annual cup and the national team. In July 2025 they launched a new logo, described as a symbol of inclusion, strength and ambition, but the rest of their material had not caught up with it. The atmosphere on a matchday was excellent; the printed and posted material around it did not say so.

I joined them for my third year work placement alongside one other designer, and the work was split: I took the information booklet, the display boards and the social templates; my placement partner, Guy Fitzgibbon, took the signage and the scoreboard.

This was not a free brief. The client handed over a brand guide and four hard constraints: everything had to be 100% consistent with the 2025 identity; it had to be accessible, meaning large type and viewing heights with high contrast against the background; it had to survive a typical sports hall, which means indoor lighting, being reusable and being quick to set up; and the client had to approve each stage before anything moved on.

So the palette was not mine to choose: background green, flag green, white and flag orange, set in Scandia. The job was to make something that felt like them, inside their own rules.

Research first, then sketching on paper before anything went near Illustrator, because that let me work through ideas quickly and throw the weak ones out cheaply. The booklet was planned panel by panel, front cover through to the back with the contact details and the social handle; the display boards were planned as three columns, with the infographic, the map of clubs and the values each getting their own space before any of it was set.

An information booklet, a set of display boards and a matchday social kit, all on the same spine: a green field, orange for anything that needs to be read first, photography of actual players, and Respect · Excellence · Belonging along the bottom of every piece.

The social templates are the part that gets used week to week: fixtures and results cards where only the club names and the numbers change, so the association can post a matchday without opening a design file.

The obstacles were real ones: uncertainty about the brief at the start, research overload after it, and then the constant job of holding brand consistency while making sure everything still read from a distance, set up quickly and worked for a wide range of people.

What I took away was less about software. Working to someone else's brand guide, taking notes in client meetings, keeping a reflective journal, planning a project across a term and having ideas inside a fixed set of barriers. None of that is something a college brief teaches you.