Edinburgh Bloods Pride Jersey

Overview

A prominent feature of AFLW is the inclusion of a pride round each year. A number of LGBTQ+ members of Edinburgh Bloods proposed creating our own pride jersey to be worn for pride month during the 2024 SARFL season and for a pride round going forward to show our inclusivity as a football club. I volunteered to help take the ideas of these members through to designs which the club committee would then vote on.

The inspiration

We looked to a number of different AFLW, NRL and Hockey teams for inspiration in how to integrate the design elements of pride such as the pride flag and colours into our own clubs visual identity.

Merging pride and our club design

Rather than just adding a pride flag to our jersey we wanted to show that pride is a big part of our club by weaving the pride colours into a design inspired by our traditional home jersey. We wanted to retain the castle motif which features on both our home and 20th anniversary indigenous jersey so it would be instantly recognisable as a Bloods jersey. A number of options were iterated on and sketched by our club members before I iterated on them in Illustrator. One idea that stuck out quite a lot was replacing the tartan in our home jersey with a pride inspired tartan, showing that pride is part of the fabric of our club.

We presented three options to our committee to vote on, a white variant of the tartan design, a dark variant, and a third option with the pride flag in a V on the front and taking up the back. The committee decided on the white variant of the tartan design to stand out from our other jerseys and to work as an alternate if needed. We added the pride and trans flags to our shoulders and the progress flag to the back to show solidarity with the trans and Black Lives Matter communities.

The final design and launch

Some minor changes were needed when we brought the design to the manufacturers O’Neills, mainly changing the orientation of the shoulder flags. Once the jerseys arrived I conducted a photo and video shoot to announce the jerseys to the wider Bloods community on our Instagram page. All three teams wore the jerseys across nine games, including the first triple header game day in the clubs history with our women’s team and two mens teams wearing them at home.