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My Ineligible Chicago Fire Third Kit Designs

The Chicago Fire Third Kit contest is finishing up their first round of voting tomorrow at midnight. As some of you may know, one of the eligibility requirements for the contest was that the individual submitting the kit be a resident of a zip code within a 75 mile radius of Toyota Park. Unfortunately, I am the one of many Fire fans who does not live within this radius:

In total, the Fire received hundreds of entries from all around Chicagoland and as far reaching as Brazil, France and the UK. Those may not be eligible but they did give us a good gauge of how expansive a contest like this can be.

Like a lot of the other contestants, being ineligible for the contest did not stop me from creating some third kits for the Fire, so I figured I would share some of them in a Fan Post.

I should also going to put a disclaimer in here somewhere about how bad I am at Photoshop. I mean, I knew I was bad until I saw some of the third kit submissions here...and here...and here. Needless to say, my skills are far, far inferior in comparison. I really need to step my Photoshopping game up.

Anyways, without further ado, here are some of my designs with brief descriptions about them.

The Sky Line Designs

To start off, I know that practically everyone and their uncle is designing a Chicago flag kit. I can understand why. The Chicago city flag is probably the most recognizable flags out of any of the major cities in the country. It's a very important symbol to the city of Chicago.

With so many people wanting to design a flag kit, I didn't feel like I could design a flag kit that would have been any different. For me, the most iconic this about Chicago is the sky line. The city sky line was the first impression I had of Chicago from when I first visited the city when I was about ten years old, so I made a few designs utilizing a silhouette of the Chicago sky line and incorporated the four red stars.

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I was incredibly proud of these designs when I first created them. Now that I have some distance from that initial euphoria that comes with creating something new, these look like nothing more than tacky replica jerseys that occasionally pop up from sports franchises. These would probably end up going on eBay for $20 in about a year.

The Blackburn Designs

I wish I could say that I was drunk when I created these, but I can't. I got some wild idea that I wanted to give the Fire a retro look, and something about the Blackburn Rovers' kits makes me think old school football. So yeah, kits to make the Fire look like the Blackburn Rovers. I bet those will sell like hot cakes.

fire_fan's Blackburn-ish album on Photobucket

Out of all the designs, there was only one design that was truely like the Balckburn kits with the half and half color scheme. The rest of the designs are the checkered/quartered style similar to what my favorite Premier League team is wearing this season.

Unfinished Striped Designs

I put together a couple of different designs with stripes. I did not finish a lot of them, and there were a couple of ideas that I never even got around to starting.

The below image still needs to have the Adidas logo added along with the team badge, but I think it would have been my submission if I was eligible. The only issue is that it looks too much like the first kit to really be a true third. The Fire are suppose to be getting new first kits next season, so if the Front Office is looking for any ideas, feel free to steal this one.

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The inspiration for the above kit came from the Arsenal kits back in 2006. I liked how the brown has a red hue to it so that it faintly resembles the red that Arsenal wear, but yet it's a completely different color. I did not want to get too far away from the traditional colors that the Fire wear, so I just chose darker shades of those colors.

I also really like using two different shades of the same color, which is where the stripes with two shades of red came in. In the below is a gallery of other unfinished stripe designs, I have one other design that pairs grey and black stripes together.

fire_fan's Unfinished Stripes album on Photobucket

Other Designs

I also tried my hand at experimenting with other ideas. Below is a gallery of different ideas plus a flag kit. I don't know how that flag kit got shuffled in there.

fire_fan's Odds n ends album on Photobucket

I also attempted to make a classically horrible looking third kit, but everything turned out looking like something the Seattle Sounders would wear, so I didn't post any of them.

The cf97 Script

One last thing to note - I put the "cf97" script from the Section 8 crest on the back of my kits to replace "Tradition. Honor. Passion." I did this for two reasons: 1.) I think the cf97 script looks classy 2.) "Tradition. Honor. Passion." has about as much meaning to me as "My doctor says, 'Mylanta'"

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