Tell us a bit about you - how long have you been working in the industry and what do you do at TwelfthMan?

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I’ve been working for about ten years in the design industry, working across magazines, books and digital publishing. I’ve always been a bit of a bookworm and that’s fed into my work as a designer. I specialised in type and layout design in my undergraduate degree, and then after a few years working, decided to study for my Master’s, researching and exploring publishing in the digital age.

I’m now a senior designer in the publications team, and I often work closely with the editorial team to put together a range of publications for high-profile sports clients. When we get the brief in, I work on designing concepts for the publication, developing ideas for how we can use the visual identity of the brand in an editorial setting. This often means creating layouts incorporating photography and text but can also include crafting infographics, illustration and lettering.

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Can you tell us about a project you have worked on that you're particularly proud of creatively, and why?

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I really enjoyed working on the cover of Champions Journal issue 17 – this was a cover feature focusing on the position of the No10 player in European football, and we chose to create an illustrated hand lettered cover, with a light and a dark coloured version. This allowed me to tap into my past experience as a book cover designer, and use my skills in creating typography and lettering. It was a nice chance to craft something physically using my hands, when so much of our work is digital – the lettering was all drawn by hand and scanned and assembled. Even the figure of the player was created using more analogue techniques, by manipulating the image using a photocopier rather than applying a digital filter.

What advice would you give to young designers looking to contribute to the growing visibility of women’s sport?

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There’s so much opportunity for creativity related to women’s sport, as it’s more grassroots and community-led. As a fan there’s a chance to contribute to the visibility of women’s sport by using design and image editing skills to make things, join communities, share ideas, make zines and online fan pages, and raise awareness. It’s also about being vocal and supporting women’s sports to hopefully gather momentum and drive more commitment to, and investment in, women’s sport.

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Where do you see the biggest opportunities for design to push women’s sport forward?

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I think there’s an opportunity within design to push for women’s sport to have an equal footing with men’s – for example, in the final programmes for UEFA we sometimes find that there can be a smaller pool of images to pull from, as the matches are smaller and there are less photographers, which can present a creative challenge. It does mean we can use design tools to work around issues such as this, using image treatments, illustration and expressive typography to enhance the design when the source materials are more pared back. In my work on these projects I try hard to inject that same creativity into the women’s programme as the men’s.