Christopher Mollard

Some background

I am a competitive fencer for Great Britain that competes in Men's Foil in the UK and international circuit. My career highlights so far include:

• Winning a bronze medal for Scotland at the 2018 Commonwealth Fencing Championships
• Being selected for the GB team to compete at the 2017 Prince Takamodo Tokyo World Cup
• Winning a bronze medal at the GB National Championships
• Having a GB ranking of 17th

I am also lucky enough to have two official sponsors who support me in my training and competitions:

• GLL Sport Foundation - a UK leading fitness and gym chain
• J4G Design - a user experience design agency that I run

Without them I wouldn't be able to train or compete as much as I do, so I'm truly grateful and want to make the most of displaying this support whever I can on my training and competition kit. As I compete in a number of locations around the world there's also a lot of potential for exposure to both fencers and non-fencers alike.

The brief

Use the brands of both companies that are supporting me on my fencing equipment, wherever it's allowed, so that their identities can be easily seen.

The process

I needed to understand what the limitations were with fencing gear, fortunately a quick Google led me to the Leon Paul (a fencing equipment manufacturer) blog where the details had already been laid out! Here's a quick summary:

It should also be noted that the logos need to work around national colours that I already have: the GBR print placed on both arms and both legs; and my name and country on my lamé. The only other place that colours are displayed are on my legs, which aren't relevant for the purposes of sponsorship. This all works well given that there are only two logos to place and they are only applicable to the non-weapon arm (left for me) and my back. The logos are: I buy my equipment from Allstar Uhlmann UK, who have the ability to print custom designs on to clothing and lamés - they were the ones who originally printed my national colours. I approached them about adding logos to my kit and discovered that the process was relatively simple as long as I could supply each design (logo) in the accurate size. One of the biggest challenges was making sure that the logos were apparent and not cramped - done so by giving them enough breathing room. As the layout of the brands have already been fixed by the FIE regulations I have avoided over-anaylsing the pain points and user journeys that are usually a part of my design process.

The result

One of the biggest challenges Make sure to have enough breathing space between logos; lame, glove, max sizes