London Sport Identity Design

London Sport pulls a network of schools, governing bodies of sport, leisure centres, coaches, clubs and many more organisations together with the aim of inspiring more Londoners to be physically active. Their mission is:

“To make London the most physically active sporting city in the world.”

It’s a new organisation, created in January 2014 following a merger of five separate organisations, the London PRO-ACTIVE partnerships.

The project was a collaboration with Torchbox – the web agency behind the London Sport new website. Prior to me joining the team, Torchbox have gone through the research and discovery phase, and they also drafted the brief. The brief was split into several aspects of the new identity. The new design needed to:

…evoke London: The new identity should speak to people within the London area and tap into the strong sense of identity and pride that many Londoners have. It should place London Sport amongst the other iconic London institutions (Mayor of London, London Underground, Olympics 2012), and make use of the visual design language already associated with the capital city. This should be done in a thoughtful way, avoiding cliches ie, no London Skylines. It should also be noted that London Sport works in the wider London area not just Central London.

…evoke sport: The identity should present itself as a mature sports related brand without alienating any specific type of sport or level of participation or activity.

…be rational: The identity should be ‘rational’ and speak to the target audiences directly without being too abstract.

The early drafts, some of which are below, focus on the name initials. Besides that, the idea was to somehow include the fact that London Sport, although a brand new organisation, is also a merger of five separate organisations, the London PRO-ACTIVE partnerships. Hence the five point star and the LS initials in the form of the Roman number five–V–in some of the drafts, from which the shield shape eventually emerged.

Below are the two concepts refined further to test on sample applications and within the client organisation.

At this stage, the client decided to pursue the shield concept, but also to drop the initials in favour of the organisation’s full name. This change is illustrated below.

The final design is visually relatively close to the previous draft. The shield’s sides have been slightly angled to appear more dynamic, while LONDON and SPORT are equalised in length which resulted in a more balanced logo mark overall.

The choice of the main corporate colour was relatively straightforward. Red evokes strength, leadership, courage, vigour, willpower, action, vibrance, radiance, determination, etc. It felt like a perfect match.

While red is used for the signature, the extended colour palette is created for and used mainly on the new London Sport website. In future applications, these colours will be assigned to various brand extensions and activities – you can see a few early drafts in this section.

Further to the colour scheme, we established a guideline according to which, if the signature is placed on any solid colour background other than black, the shield shape should always be white and the logotype will match the background colour.

The shape of the logo mark shield is based on a grid which allowed us to create a system for sub-brands, organisation activities, different London area branches and other similar signature variations.

The variations are potentially many and they can be set in any colour except for the corporate red, which is exclusive to the main brand.

Below are a few examples.

The alternative signature is designed to be used when the artwork application area is limited and too small for the main signature to keep its legibility. It’s also designed for when the proportions of available space would make the application of the main signature difficult. As shown on the example below, a pencil is one such example.

The stationery was designed with the clearance and grid of the signature in mind. This set the basic guidelines which we later applied and expanded to brochures and other applications.

In the brochures, the basic stationery guidelines are expanded to incorporate the use of photography where the signature can partially invade the area of the image.

The angles of the shield side edges are also used to crop images, as illustrated by the examples below.