Back in August 2024, I was approached to see whether I could help a local Gloucestershire charity, Frampton Fundraisers, by designing a ‘Race Card’ for their annual Sheep and Pony Racing event.
This was quite a unique project, to be completely honest I didn’t know what a Race Card was, but after seeing the previous year’s Race Card I thought this was something I would be able to support them with.
The basis of a Race Card is that it lays out the entire day of races as well as other useful information. In this particular Race Card, there was also a number of adverts dotted throughout the Card.
After an initial meeting, I started work immediately on the Race Card. It was quite a tight turnaround, but I was pretty confident it would be doable!
It took a little while to make a meaningful dent in the work, as this Race Card was over 20 pages. I decided, and logically, that the first element to tackle was the front cover.
I looked at the previous year’s front covers, and I was looking to do something a little different and add my own unique twist to it. I was thinking about potential design concepts and tried to find something that was relevant and significant to the Sheep and Pony Racing event.
So, once I had come up with a concept in my mind, on one summers evening, my dad very kindly drove me (and my camera!) to Frampton on Severn, in Gloucestershire, to allow me to capture an iconic Frampton landmark, the Frampton Court entrance gates.
I took many photos from several different angles to try and ensure that one of the photos would be suitable to use on the cover.
When I returned home, I popped the image through some post-processing and then added it into an Adobe Photoshop file. Part of my design plan was to add some sheep jumping over a hurdle between the gates. That meant I needed to try and find an appropriate image of sheep jumping over one of the infamous jumps.
It took a little while, but eventually, I found the perfect photo! So, a bit of Photoshop and Illustrator magic later as well as adding in a couple of other design elements and text, I had a front cover!
I won’t bore you with all the details of the design, but it’s safe to say that there were a lot of steps to reach a final design. These steps included:
- Arranging and designing the important information in a way that is as easy to understand as possible;
- Helping to design some of the advertisements (which was certainly a first for me!);
- Finding suitable and appropriate photos to use throughout the Race Card;
- Creating and drawing all the graphics that are included in the design by hand; and
- Of course, coming up with a number of Sheep and Pony puns to add a bit of humour to the design.
If you would like to have a peruse of the Race Card, click here (or the image below) to view a digital flipbook of the design.
I would like to end this blog by thanking the brilliant team at Frampton Fundraisers for allowing me to work on a project of this scale and for being so supportive (especially for putting up with my mum and my frequent calls and emails)!
Check out the Frampton Fundraisers Facebook page for updates and information about their wide range of events!
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