ant

Some valid points but yet again we see the problem of taking everyone's opinion into account! You can't endlessly compromise or amend, amend, amend. Not to mention that what some think looks smart others will judge an abomination. Personally I think it's best to stick to the precedent of clubs that have got it right. As has been said rather less diplomatically there's a fair few less accomplished efforts in this thread. If we're not going to pay a studio to design it (highly unlikely), we should at least make use of the pro designers here who are willing to work on this for nothing. Quick, ask GeckoSaint for the vector of the top of those 3 options and close the thread

Compare Gecko's design to the style used in the Liverpool examples and surely we can agree that it's getting closer now? I second putting the text on one line. Although it'll lose some prominence, isn't it a sideline in terms of importance to the actual image anyway? Plus it'll allow 'Markus' to be bigger. Mike has delivered a clear brief now in terms of what needs to be on the flag and where; we'd do well to stick with it or this'll never be sorted in time. Adjusting the typeface etc. (IF necessary) is a two second job once a clear winner is decided upon.

OK right, think I'm with you. Literally all I did was take the white version of Markus' face from the red-on-white design and turn it red. No other alterations. The reason it looks like that is partly because of the way our eyes perceive colour/absense thereof, but also because there was a heavier emphasis on certain parts which worked against a white background but don't when placed on block colour. As I said, it would take a few alterations to Scudamore's original vector image to make it sit correctly against a red BG. If a concise brief is sorted before this evening I'll have a stab when I get home from work.

Erm, unless I've misunderstood what you've written, that's what I did Can we get this narrowed down to a 2 or 3 bulletpoint brief? A designer's worst nightmare is working without explicit guidelines, then having their drafts criticised for missing the mark. I've been meaning to properly get to grips with Illustrator for a while now so I'm more than happy to give this a go if I clearly know what I'm aiming for. Not to devalue anybody else's contribution of course. Probably just time I stopped talking and started scribbling

It's not as simple as that though. I've just done a very quick 'n scruffy colour replace in Photoshop and you can see that it emphasises some of the wrong parts of his face: Now if it was decided that this is definitely the way to go then I'm sure Scudamore wouldn't mind adjusting that One thing that I have noticed is that pretty much all of these have used fairly muted reds - slightly orange or pink in hue. The OS uses #d71921 (RGB - web designer remember ) as its background colour and that's a stronger, slightly more Southampton-ish colour - to my eyes at least. Par exemple: Just to give an idea of the colour difference you understand. Personally I like the design of him on the white but could understand if there were practicalities to consider if the flag was white. As I said earlier, this could go round in an infinite number of circles. Might I suggest that we narrow this down to the current best design and 'perfect' just that one from there (in terms of font, copy and so on)?

Whether the way theyin put his comments across was off the mark or not, the content of what he was saying is spot on. However I'm glad that it's now starting to concentrate down onto the better efforts. Design by committee NEVER works (the process is often attributed to poorly designed or unpopular products) so suffice to say it may be necessary to eschew democracy (purely in terms of the absolute final decision making) in order to achieve a high quality flag. I think we can pretty much all agree that even if there's subtleties about the design that you'd have personally done differently, it's worth glossing over them to ensure we don't waste £4k+ on something that looks sh*t and so never gets used again. If we're taking forward the mooted design, nobody has to take it as read that that's exactly how it needs to be sent to be created. The red can be made darker, Markus can be brought out more - whatever is essential. It's very rare for there to be design work completed without any amends whatsoever. The difference is that you report to a project manager or brief owner, so at least there's only a few people in the feedback loop. Ultimately I believe IMO that it should to be JustMike in this instance as he was kind enough and committed enough to step up and take the mantle. Mike - is there a timescale for how long it would take the company to create our flag and have it delivered? Just starting to think about when the deadline needs to be for the design stage to be completed. The other danger is that we endless tinker with it and it drags on too long for the flag to be ready for day 1 of the season. Final note - GeckoSaint's design is striking and iconic, but it's almost certainly too intricate for a flag (my limited knowledge of creating on material at the scale we're discussing notwithstanding). It would be brilliant used on in-your-face media types such as a website's splash page or a matchday programme.

When Lallana was out injured I thought we became very narrow in our play (well, on the left-hand side at least). In fact the ball barely went there other than when Harding was charging forward. Not sure though overall, could be worth a tinker if we definitely have the players to slot into the roles surrounding him. What I do know is that I was p*ssed off when EA changed Saints' default formation on FIFA 11 to the diamond. FFS!

FWIW, I think the image in post #79 comes closest so far to what we're looking for.

OK, I'm a web designer by trade and not a graphic (print) designer, but there's a few things that need serious consideration: Have any of these designs been created in Illustrator? A rasterized image won't do at any DPI, it needs to be a scalable vector graphic (unless the flag creators are VERY generous and will re-create the design at the appropriate scale as part of the price). Though some of these layouts look pretty good on a nice flat screen, it's highly unlikely that the flag will be so legible or recognisable when being passed around St. Mary's. Further to the above, the design needs to be bold and feature the minimum number of colours (which is why the red and white background/grayscale Markus idea fits). If there's to be any text it'll need to be pretty large (even relative to the flag size) and possibly will need a stretched height and increased gap between letters. I will do my best to find time to knock a rough design up this weekend, but as I say I'm a Photoshop man so it'll only be useful as a concept, not the finished article. However it could significantly aid with finalising typography etc. as those elements are closer to my forte. One of the biggest problems will be that there's not going to be a photo of Markus in existence with an adequate resolution for printing straight onto a flag. If somebody could step up to the bat and draw a grayscale or black and white vector version based on one of the photos we'd be cooking with gas.

With a quick browse I found another few: http://thesaintsfc.proboards.com/ http://www.ohwhenthesaints.net/ http://www.southampton-mad.co.uk/ There's a Flash-based site out there too but can't remember the URL.

I think there's certainly some truth in that. When a colleague and fellow Saints fan met Bridge at an event late last year Wayne told him that he his heart wasn't in the move to Chelsea and that Lowe was pulling the strings on the deal. I'll let you lot extrapolate the potential worthiness of that statement from the bull**** (because of course I'm sure the salary had nothing to do with it!)

I'd be up for a kickabout if there's definitely going to be a few others. Could be good to get it going as a regular thing?

That's a fantastic contribution, but might I suggest that it's worth advertising it on as many places as you can easily do so (without paying)? Other Southampton FC forums and the Gumtree website may help to bring forward additional interested parties? Wouldn't want to see such an awesome collection selling for a pittance

Given how sensibly Oxlade-Chamberlain was grafted into the first team (granted he got a lot of playing time quickly, but was also regularly taken off early or rested), I'd say that Adkins and his team can be trusted to blood the youngsters in the best way possible. It might be that it's only feasible to give that level of attention to one or two of them at a time, but I'm confident that if there's players that are good enough they'll get the experience they deserve.

That video alone was worth my £3.99. Not sure how I managed before Player to be honest!

Haha, apologies if any offence was caused. I went to the 'proper' uni so banter was pretty common. Have a few good mates that went to Solent so I know first-hand that the generalisations about its students aren't true (as if they ever are!) The ones that live down my road seem intent on hammering the stereotypes into my brain however

Carlton Place. There's some nice pubs around the Polygon area, but the rest of is full of Solent Uni and town chav-type abominations.

If you ignore the pics with my ugly mug in them, I got a couple of fairly decent ones from Saturday. This should be a public link so you ought not need Facebook access, but let me know if there's any issues. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.745259749192.275303.286107279&l=a74536bc12 Was going to get my shirt printed up before the Walsall game but the queue was mental, so sorted it out pre-Saints Day match

Great post - always nice to get a bit of a 'behind the scenes' outlook on the day Hung around for quite a while at the end but didn't realise that all of this was going on. Going off on a tangent, does anybody know why Rickie had that headband thing (bandage?) on in the first half? He didn't seem to be wearing it after the break (or maybe the beers were really starting to kick in by then!) Absolutely perfect day for me, crowned a few hours ago by marching home from the pub through the torrential rain with my better half, belting out as many Saints chants as you could care to mention. We got a few bemused looks, but nearly as many people joined in

Given the way he was celebrating after the final whistle, that first sentence doesn't surprise me! Don't get me wrong - it's fantastic that the fringe players are all on the bus too, but he's not had a minute of involvement Seems 90 degrees is a bit of a player hangout. My girlfriend and I were around Carlton Place/Bedford Place but we lamed out and headed home before midnight. Nearly 12 hours of drinking will do for one day

Cortese was in the Itchen as the players came out with the tinpot trophy. As it all started to die down he walked back past towards the corporate area so I gave him a tap on the shoulder and said "thank you"

Come along and spend the entire match booing them then.

I'm assuming there's not going to be a strict formation as such, since there's currently three right backs and only two midfielders (well, three if you count Tessem, but that only leaves one striker!) Presumably more announcements to come... Hell, it's going to be a long, football-less Summer so any excuse to get down to St. Mary's is a welcome one as far as I'm concerned. If people are concerned about it 'weakening' Saturday's celebrations that's just churlish. Nothing to say that you can't still go all-out - no doubt the current first team will be! It's a generous optional extra and nothing more. I personally plan to use it as a bit of casual fun to take my mind off of the inevitable hangover monkey of 'King Kong' proportions that'll be residing on my head

A quick thought - if there's not to be a collection on Saturday, would it be worth trying to organise something for the 'All Star' match on Sunday? I'm sure there's plenty of fans that would be willing to contribute but won't hear about this via Facebook/Twitter/the forum and it's pretty much the last chance before the new season.

Living in the city centre has made me a bit lazy with matchday preparations (usually just roll up about 15 mins before KO ), so I'm open to suggestions as to where the best pre-game atmosphere is likely to be. Guide Dog? The Alex? King Alfred? Somewhere on Oxford Street? All of the above? My girlfriend was nearly as chuffed as me today(!) so she's a shoo-in for my second ticket. Intend to get out of the house and onto the booze for midday at the latest (wherever we start out) and grab an extra cheeky pint at the ground if there's time to spare. Apparently I'm getting an all expenses paid meal afterwards (courtesy of my aforementioned partner), then back out to wherever the night takes us It's going to be a massive party regardless, but it'd be fantastic to wrap the season up with one more win. Sunday will almost certainly feature a painful and hard-earned hangover to end them all!