It's no secret that Stefan Frei's skills aren't limited to the pitch. The Seattle Sounders goalkeeper has artistic chops and has shared them with the Sounders community before, most notably through his Posters by the People design last season in the first year of the program.
Frei wasn't going to let a new season start without making his mark. This time, his design has made its way on to a limited-edition t-shirt which will be available only at the Jersey Launch Event on Friday, February 19 at the Pro Shop at CenturyLink Field. The shirt will be available to the first 500 people who purchase a new jersey at the event.
For Frei, the assignment was the perfect escape to see a concept through from start to finish.
"I love to work digitally on the computer with a pen and tablet," he said. "Sometimes when you don't have any deadlines and you're doing it for fun, you spend hours on a project and at some point, you just give up. It never turns into a complete project.
"When you know people will see it ... I embrace these opportunities because it encourages you to push through it and it helps me to grow as an artist. It's a huge honor to be able to make some art and so far, the response has been great. I'm enjoying myself."
Use the slider to move from an early rendition of Frei's concept to the final product.
The design echoes elements of the new adidas kits for the 2016 season, released on Wednesday. Frei, however, didn't see the completed design before he started his own work.
"I started this project before I had seen the new jerseys. I had only seen some of the patterns," he said. "With that being said, I knew I wanted to do something abstract and different than my Posters by the People design. From there, I started the way I usually start my drawings: I put down a lot of lines, with some of them being random and then others being the same weight as the lines in our crest. From that point, I developed a large geometric shape with subtraction of other lines."
While an outsider may see the team's crest as the focal point of the piece, Frei said it's more about what it represents to him.
"The central focus is the badge. Our badge has two crests within it: the blue and the green," he said. "Once I started jotting down those large geometric shapes, I felt the blue represented our team and our organization. The green is our fans, our supporters and our community. All the digital lines keep everything together. Just like our fans, everything stays connected in the way those lines pull the piece together."
With just days to go before the start of his third season in Seattle, Frei said the project allowed him to reflect on his own feelings about the organization.
"All those lines are holding it all together," he said. "Just like our club functions, we have all these people pulling in the same direction. It's a huge organization, we're a huge community and we're all going in the same direction."
