How do you change something that people don’t realise needs changing? That was the question facing John Elvin when he and his young family moved from Hammersmith in south west London to the Midlands. West Bromwich Albion had poached him from his kitchen table.

It was the late 1960s and John had been making a steady living by designing posters of footballers from home. He had quit his job at a design agency in London and orders kept coming through the post, with fans looking to buy a poster of Jeff Astle or Alan Ball, rolled up in a cardboard tube, with Elvin’s signature. West Brom had noticed him – noticed the way he used image and typography like nobody else – and made him an offer. Their matchday programme was floundering. John, do you want to take it over? He did.

A little look at the numbers: in 1968-69, Albion News came near the bottom in the annual programme poll conducted by the magazine Soccer Star. In 1969-70, John’s first in charge, it came top.

John’s eldest son, Mark, was nine when his dad took over Albion News. “He was always a big football fan, a big Chelsea supporter,” says Mark. “But when we moved to the Midlands for him to work with West Brom, that was it. It took over.”

Mark started supporting the club and has done so ever since. Nine is the perfect age to be dropped into the world of football: old enough to appreciate it, yet still young enough to not get bogged down in all the politics. “You’re just a sponge, aren’t you?” says Mark. “We had a player called Bobby Hope – he was fantastic – and one day my dad was talking to him on the phone and said to me: ‘Come and speak to Bobby.’ But no, I couldn’t go within 10 feet of that phone. It was like: ‘I can’t speak to him! I watched him play on the Saturday!’ It was normal to him, but alien to me.”

His dad’s work represented that same wide-eyed excitement and love for the game. But, revered though it was, Elvin’s work with the Baggies was just a precursor for what came next. Coventry swooped, moving him across the Midlands to a little terraced house opposite their old Highfield Road stadium to make Sky Blue. “You can’t get closer to the club than that,” says Mark. “That was when it all changed. It became his obsession.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A collection of Elvin’s work.

Elvin had no formal design education but rather worked from his feel for what looked right. He said he never even learned the rules he was supposedly breaking every week. Back then the matchday programme was seen as largely perfunctory literature to announce the line-ups, printed dirt cheap and treated as such by fans. Elvin felt that needed to change. At Coventry, he came in and pissed everyone off, clashing with the chairman, manager and fans, then gave them what they wanted before they knew what that was.

As soon as he arrived, he doubled the price of Sky Blue to two shillings. Nobody had ever done that before. “They weren’t happy,” laughs Mark “But he was driven, confident about his ability and confident the magazine would be worth price.” It was close to a scandal. Two bob! For a programme! But if you want quality, you have to pay for it. That’s a motto to respect but a risk too few of Elvin’s peers were willing to take. Sky Blue wasn’t a magazine to be read in the half hour before the game then discarded; it was supposed to be taken home. He didn’t want to make a matchday programme; he wanted to make a weekend programme. It was to be read and remembered.

Somehow, this man with only a year’s experience was given fuck-you privileges at the club. For as long as Elvin was around, Sky Blue would be the vision of one man. This 30-year-old man, with flatplans and sheets splayed everywhere, is working all day and all night, and Jimmy Hill’s on the phone saying: “Can we have a look before you print it?” and Elvin, the man they hired to make the thing, just replies: “No. You’ll see it Saturday.”

“That’s exactly what it was,” says Mark. “He worked every hour of every day. The room was covered with ideas. He had utmost control over the programme and nobody was allowed to stick their oar in anywhere.” You can’t really get away with that now, obviously, with the mountains of cash and marketing teams involved.

When Elvin arrived, he thought Sky Blue had a “parochial” quality, so he started again. And what he produced had it all: cut-and-paste action shots, all hand done, with stark Expressionist-style filters, funny spot illustrations, pop-arty repeating patterns, and giant close-up photo portraits of players, all crooked teeth and golf-hole size pores like surreal grotesques.

But the real high point was the absolutely cracking typography. Different lettering with different features: something techy for the stats page, something fluffy for Christmas, something chunky and Germanic for Bayern Munich in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, a blackletter in the style of legendary German type designer Rudolf Koch. It might seem a bit obvious now, but people just didn’t do that before him. Before that, the programme was just some text and numbers, the odd picture of Jimmy Hill smiling. By 1972, Elvin won a D&AD Award for his efforts. One of the most prestigious awards in design won by a bloke doing a zine for Cov.

“When it’s one person, you can have an undiluted idea,” says Matt Caldwell of 1 Shilling, an Instagram page that celebrates the glories of programmes through the ages. “That’s how great things happen. Anybody can ‘do design’ now, which makes things a little less special. Like how everyone’s a writer because they have a blog, or everyone’s a photographer with their phones. It means you get less art, like what John was doing. John was an artist, an artisan and a designer at the same time. You don’t get that anymore. He was the best of the best. He could have been at any top design or advertising agency and making a killing, but he wasn’t. He was doing this.”

His run at Sky Blue wouldn’t last long – just one season – as he clashed with the people who signed his cheques, even as fans quickly came round to quality of his work, which was voted the best club programme in the country by Football League Review. “It seems originality breeds contempt,” wrote Elvin in the final issue. “In the 1970s, when footballers are paid huge sums for their skills, the supporters are still treated as though they cannot think for themselves. Coventry City are making a mistake in keeping with their slogan ‘People are Important’, which could not be more inappropriate for me and the 8,000 regulars who bought Sky Blue this season. I wish my successor the best of luck, he’ll need it!”

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He left Coventry to join the Radio Times (with a brief spell at Chelsea doing their programmes to lesser success, the club not allowing the freedom he’d enjoyed previously) before ill health necessitated an early retirement in the late 1970s. His dream to make a football magazine called The Saturday Man sadly never came to fruition, but his work remains influential.

“Even now Sky Blue looks iconic,” says Caldwell. “You know when you see a piece of work and just know it’s part of the German Bauhaus movement or Grapus in Paris? John’s work really feels like that. It feels like its own style, its own moment. I see this as a style that’s never really been championed. He was the first to do a lot of these things and nobody has really acknowledged that. Design is about creating a mood, an attitude, a feeling when you hold something in your hands. John did that.”

“It wasn’t until recently, speaking to your magazine, that I realised how influential he was,” says Mark as he carefully puts away his pristine copies of his dad’s work. “It’s taken me back, really. It’s great to still have his work with me and great to be able to show them to people. It almost brings a tear to my eye. They usually just stay in the tea chest at home.”

• This article appeared first in Issue 16 of MUNDIAL

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