As anyone who reads the blog on a regular basis will be able to tell you, my current game is based in South America, Brazil to be precise, and one thing that the Football Manager community lacks is a logo pack that covers those leagues. Yes, there are packs that cover the top divisions in Brazil, Argentina and most other CONMEBOL top divisions, but it irritates me when I face a ‘lesser’ side in a competition and the logo isn’t there. With this in mind I decided it was time to bite the bullet and start collecting logos myself. As a graphics virgin it would be fair to say that I did so with some trepidation but I needn’t have worried, logos are actually very easy to collect and then get into your game. Here’s a little tutorial…

First of all you should download the following items as they’ll make the whole process a lot easier:

Once you’ve downloaded the PhotoShop Actions you will need to get the program to recognise them. I struggled getting PhotoShop to load them using the menus within the program but there is an alternative method – simply drag the icon created by the download over your PhotoShop icon and they should load automatically next time you start the program.

In terms of actually locating the logos, I recommend using the official club sites and as well as the following ones which are also very good:

For the purposes of the tutorial I’ll guide you through the process of creating two logos for FM, one that’s basic and simple and one that’s a little bit harder. The basic principles are the same regardless of size, shape and complexity in all honesty, but lets start with the simple one – Arsenal.

First of all you need to locate the logo, I’m going to use the one hosted by liblib. Right click on the image and select the Copy Image option (as below).

copy.png

Now we need to create a new document in PhotoShop, so go to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘New’. This should result in a Dialog box opening, make sure the settings look like those below and then click ‘Ok’.

new.png

You should now have a blank document in which to paste the logo we copied earlier. So, select the ‘Edit’ menu and choose the ‘Paste’ option. This should leave you with an image that looks something like this:

pasted.png

Next we need to remove that white background from the image otherwise it’ll look odd in the game. There are various ways to do it but with a simple logo like this the easiest and quickest way is to use the’Magic Eraser’ tool.

magic.png

It’s important that you alter the ‘Tolerance’ at this point as a high tolerance level will delete a lot of colours that are similar to the area you click on (e.g. clicking on white while the tolerance level is set at about 80% will also remove a lot of pale pinks, blues, greys etc – not good when we’re trying to create crisp, clear logos). I find that a value of 10-15% is usually best, but it’s worth experimenting to see the different effects that changing the tolerance can have (depending on the logo you can go as low as 1% or as high as 75-80%).

tolerance2.png

Now it’s just a case of clicking on any of the white background in order to remove it. That should leave you with something resembling the image below. Don’t worry about the grey and white squares, they indicate that the background is clear.

clear.png

The image is now starting to look more like something that could be used in our game, but we’re not quite finished. At the moment there’s far too much space around the edges of the logo, applying our PhotoShop Actions at this point would add more space and make the logo smaller. We need to crop the image so that as much of the background area as possible is removed. So, select the ‘Crop’ tool and cut as near to the image as possible (carefully, you don’t want to remove any of the actual logo), it’s helpful to zoom in on the image to help you see better. When you’re happy that you’re as close as you’re going to get confirm the crop by clicking the tick near the top right of your screen.

crop1.png
crop2.png

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Time to consider saving the file now and different people have different ideas on this subject. My own personal preference is to put the files in My Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2007\logos\huge\[country] with the file name being the club’s unique ID number (602 in Arsenal’s case). You should also make sure to save the file as a png file type. Then you can run the other actions to create the different logo sizes you require, making sure you save them in an appropriate directory.

As promised we’re now going to look at a logo that’s a little more difficult. I’ve chosen to use the Burnley FC logo (again from liblib).

burnley.png

As you can see, there are small areas of white that need to be removed from among the leaves and the lions tails. While it’s not impossible to remove these using the ‘Magic Eraser’ tool, it’s probably better to use the ‘Background Eraser’ tool.

backg1.png

Make sure that the background colour showing near the bottom of the bar is the same as the background you want to erase and that the tool settings resemble those below(again you can experiment with the tolerance and brush size settings for the best effect).

sett.png

Now you can just erase the background colour by moving the mouse around with the left button held down. Your end result should be something like this one:

burnley1.png

You can now crop, re-size and save it as we did with the Arsenal logo.

Having created our logos we now need a config.xml file to enable them to show in the game. Load up the FM Graphics Configurator and use the ‘Browse’ button to select the directory where your logos were saved. Then select the radio buttons that correspond to your logos (e.g. we’ve just created a huge club logo), hit the process button and you should be able to load up FM07, refresh the skin cache and see your logo in the game.

config.png

The techniques learnt in doing these two logos won’t suddenly mean that you can immediately manage to do every logo out there, but they will ensure that with a bit of experimentation you’ll be able to the majority and teach yourself to do some of the others. For instance I’ve learnt (through trial and error mainly) that:

  • Some logos will become a black, mess when using the copy and paste method. Try saving them rather than copying.
  • Some images won’t let you edit them. Select the ‘Image’ menu, highlight the ‘Mode’ option and ensure that the image is set to ‘RGB Colour’ (this can also help if your image loses a lot of definition when re-sized).