“I think a couple of my ideas riffed off the tactical geometrical aspect of set-piece coaches, where I explored the idea of a game being planned out as a blueprint and not on a tactics board.
“The next step was to consider other famous artefacts representing geniuses, which led me to the sculpture of The Thinker, which I thought could be tweaked and twisted to suggest Guardiola as being one of the game’s great tacticians and intellectuals. Actually visualising the sculpture of The Thinker in the same pose as Guardiola, and to then turn him into stone, was technically a little tricky and took me a day or two to work out.
“I really enjoy the conceptual part of the process, exploring ideas, being playful with a whole range of visual possibilities. I also enjoyed the visual twist of the ball bouncing off Pep's head almost as if it was a set play pass from a throw-in or a corner.
“To come up with these ideas, I do lots and lots and lots of drawing; these drawings are the visual ingredients that allow me to mix and match elements to make new ideas, but they also inspire me to play around with twisting things, putting things in unusual contexts, or changing the characteristics of visuals. So, quite simply, in this case, the idea of making a real human out of stone is not something that would technically happen but something that I imagined could be a fun visual in order to communicate an idea.
“I’m a mentor at The School of Communication Arts, and I love sharing with students great visual communication on billboards and posters. There’s something so effortless and concise about a great poster that I try to emulate in my illustrations.”
