How Music founded a football identity on lettering found at London’s oldest stadium

When it concerns branding, football fans can be a quite conservative lot. Brave is the designer who sets out to alter a crest, change a colour or tinker a century-old, picky symbol. Anticipate a social networks storm within the hour, and some option words to hypothesize on your parentage.

When Fulham FC, a club with more than 145 years of history, chose it wanted to breathe brand-new life into its identity, some creatives may have made their reasons and left.

Manchester-based independent studio Musicnevertheless, was made from sterner things. The firm has a long-running relationship with Fulham, and together they developed a brand-new identity around a piece of hand-rendered lettering discovered within the material of Craven Cottage: the club’s ground, and the earliest football arena in all of London.

Factor for the rebrand

Why rebrand at all? From Fulham’s point of view, the spur was just how much the relationship in between football clubs and their fans has actually altered. Today, advocates do not simply get in touch with football through 90 minutes on the pitch. They follow it through digital and social, purchase merch, participate in occasions and experience it in larger culture.

This cultural modification has actually been shown at Fulham through, for example, the redevelopment of the Riverside Stand and the arrival of Fulham Pier, developing brand-new hospitality, home entertainment and cultural experiences along with the football.

“Our club has grown significantly in recent years and so have the number of ways in which people experience us,” states Jack Burrows, marketing director at Fulham FC. “We’re speaking to lifelong supporters, new fans, local and international audiences as well as hospitality guests, each through very different channels and touchpoints. Some of these groups may attend matches regularly, others may never set foot inside Craven Cottage.”

That’s a great deal of various audiences to keep pleased. The short to Music, then, was to produce something unique and versatile, without tossing the infant out with the bathwater.

Real-world heritage

Following its own research study, the firm discovered what it was searching for in the arena itself: a piece of lettering on the side of the club’s historical home. Music generated type foundry F37 to establish the initial lettering. The outcome is a household with real variety, changing the initial arena lettering into a complete type system that works throughout all of the club’s interactions.

“We’ve worked with Fulham for a long time, which means this didn’t begin with a desire to redesign everything,” discusses Dave Simpson, CEO and executive imaginative director at Music.”It started with comprehending what was altering around the club and asking how the brand name might end up being more unique without losing the important things individuals currently enjoyed about it.

“Craven Cottage gave us the answer. The lettering within the stadium had all the character we were looking for: it was genuinely Fulham, rather than something applied to Fulham.”

That, to me, is essential to why it works so well. A dismal variety of brand names nowadays attempt to harness retro designs to offer themselves a sense of heritage, however in such a way that appears empty and rootless. Here, however, the source product was actually part of the structure.

As Dave puts it: “The concept and the expression are the exact same thing. It isn’t heritage sitting together with a modern-day identity; the heritage is what produces the contemporary identity.

“This work gives us something that feels contemporary enough to support our growth whilst remaining vitally authentic,” states Jack. “It allows us to be consistent, but also much more agile and expressive.”