30 December 2018 · Dennis Schmidt

Space-Style Formula 1 Patches

Earlier this year, Spanish designer Borja Sanz created something truly unique. Inspired by the NASA mission patches, he came up with a bespoke patch design for each Grand Prix of the 2018 Formula 1 season. Unfortunately, he had to abandon the project mid-way through the year due to a lack of time, but it's still a superb project.

What inspired Borja to start this project was his interest in both racing and space. ‘Since I was a child I have been fascinated by anything refered to sky. I had a telescope and spent a lot of summer nights observing the stars. And, of course, the human exploration of space, the rockets and all that stuff is amazing.’

Throughout the year, Borja created patches for the first ten rounds of 2018 and one for the Japanese Grand Prix. To start things off, he created a vector illustration in Illustrator which he then imported into Photoshop to add the embroidery effect – partly with a plugin, partly manually. ‘I enjoy doing these kinds of projects. As a graphic designer and racing enthusiast it is always a good way to put into practice your own abilities and show them to the world.‘

Borja even approached Liberty Media in an attempt to convert the concepts into real-life patches he could hand out or sell to customers or even to the Formula 1 right holders themselves. ’The point is that I have been using Formula 1 name and typography and I was asking them about the possibility of using it for commercial purposes because of a guy asking me for doing the patches with real embroidery.‘ However, Borja never got a reply from Liberty Media, so the designs didn't turn into reality just yet.

Whether Borja will continue or complete the series in 2019 is not sure yet. The biggest problem for him is that they didn't get the recognition to justify the amount of work. However, he's considering on working on a project, that's either less time-consuming and time-critical – like creating these mission patches for past Grands Prix.