Inspired by SCOUTED‘s version of their own Notebook series, I attempted to create my own Scouting Notebooks for the Vietnamese audience through my Facebook page, Talking Tactics (and its predecessor, The Scouting Reports). The first version (first four images) was done entirely on the Adobe suite, including Photoshop for designing the player graphics, and InDesign for constructing the PDF of the Notebook. It was released for free and was fairly well-received by the Vietnamese football community.

Even with the relative success of the first notebook, I wanted to take another step up for the second version using the lessons learned from the first version. This included a complete revamp of player graphics and a better way to visualise key metrics for each player, which allowed me to push my Photoshop skills to its limit and learn a lot on the fly. Though I never managed to finish the second version due to time constraints, the player graphics that came out of the second version were some of the proudest graphic design work that I have ever done.

The design for the player graphics were heavily inspired by the design of some of my favourite cards on Topps Kick as an homage to the app that has now been discontinued, added with a little personal touch to make the graphics fit the theme of each Notebook and to look the way that I visioned.