I’ve been part of the rapidly expanding cheerleading world for the past 8 years, performing in various teams and running a program of my own for a number of years which I sadly had to give up last year due to work commitments. As a sport, I love it. It really is a sport that pretty much anyone can do as long as you have the enthusiasm. And please note I do passionately refer to it as a SPORT, there was no standing on the sidelines here. Cheerleading these days is very much about training hard, sweating, getting the odd elbow to the face and going all out when it comes to competing with other teams.

It was natural that the two biggest interests in my life would collide – design and cheer. In my previous employment I designed Cheerleading kit, and it did very well, one of the best companies in the country in fact. It lead to lots of different projects about cheer, one of them being a collaboration I did with the UK Cheerleading Magazine.

The ‘Worlds’ Edition of the magazine is the equivalent of the Vogue September Issue. The big one. And I was kindly asked by the editor to illustrate a piece on what to pack for the teams going to the World Championships. I’ve used this style of illustration many a time consisting of pen tool drawing in Illustrator, taking in to Photoshop to add colour and a little shading then doing some arrangements of InDesign. As you can see from the below the client wasn’t happy with the first arrangement all shooting out of the bag but loved the second. It was loud and bright and CHEERFUL and that’s what made it to print…