Persona Design

Product Overview: 

The GAA or Gaelic Athletic Association is Ireland’s largest national indigenous sports brand, contributing to both national and local identities, it’s part of the very fabric and culture of Irish society and has an immensely rich and colourful heritage. Indeed 2009 marked the GAA 125th anniversary.

 

GAA sports include Hurling, Gaelic Football, Ladies Football, Camogie, Handball and Rounders with an avid following from all age groups, genders and socio-economic classes. Every County in Ireland, of which there are 32, has it’s own County Colours and Crest to which it’s County’s team and their supporters form their allegiances.

 

The GAA stationery range we designed was developed to be a commercially very successful, yet affordable range of GAA license stationery products sold throughout Ireland and accessible to all.

 

Client Brief:

Every County in Ireland has it’s own County Colours, Crest and sport teams with ardent supporters. Our brief required designing a range of 6 individual product ranges for each of the 32 Counties, a total of 192 products each with their own unique County Colours and Crest to target that particular County’s supporters. All products also carried the GAA official merchandise branding. The primary target market was school children, teenagers and students although there has been some very keen adult interest too.

 

The designs had to be developed within stringent GAA guidelines and the dominant language featured on all products had to be Irish. They had to be gender neutral. None of the designs could feature people or locations, nor could they carry images with third party logos or copies of any other GAA designed material. Yet they had to instantly resonate with GAA fans in each of their relevant Counties in Ireland.

 

The County colours and Crest reproduced on all items, of which there were a variety of different materials used (fabric, paper, plastic etc.) had to be an accurate match to each other and the official designated County colours. Reproduction and product quality had to be of the highest standard in each product developed.

 

Solution:

The designs had to trigger responses of immediate recognition and fervent support. Each County range had to strongly feature that County’s colours and Crest which dictated the core elements of the designs i.e. the dominant colour of a County colour palette had to be the dominant colour in the product designed. 

 

The most obvious fan recognition factor after a County’s colours and crest are the County jerseys or (sports tops) worn by County teams, each of which is different in each of the 32 Counties in Ireland. Fans typically wear official replica jerseys to games when supporting their teams. We couldn’t copy the jersey designs, as these are also copyright protected but we could design another alternative jersey which emulated each County’s dominant colour usage. 

 

Each range included a full colour A4 ring binder with a matching A4 refill pad, jersey shaped spiral bound notebooks in three sizes and a high quality tubular fabric, zipped pencil case with carry handle. They have been an immense success. 

 

There are too many different products in the range to feature on our website but we’ve included a few from 6 of the 32 counties to give you a flavour of what we designed. We also designed a full range of launch and brand support collateral which proved immensely successful too.

 

 

If you'd like to know more we'd be delighted to talk with you T: +353 1 8322724