Fontsmith were approached by creative agency Radiant Studios to design an original font family for the UEFA Champions League. The tournament is the world's premier club football competition, with an annual television audience exceeding 288 million.
The Champions League logotype has until now been a weighty, traditional serif face which has served its purpose well for the last 12 years – a symbol of the world’s best club football competition. The challenge to Fontsmith’s designers was to maintain the prestige of this valuable brand asset whilst subtly modernising and injecting energy.
‘We needed to come up with something bespoke that complimented the existing logo and graphics, and we played around with several possibilities: sans serif, serif, brushstroke,’ says Jason Smith. ‘By far the strongest and most striking part of the existing imagery was the ball suggested by a pattern of stars. We kept returning to this and explored the angles on the points of the stars to see if we could incorporate them into the letterforms.’
The final result is a quirky and decidedly European sans serif, crisp and sometimes spiky, available in regular, bold and a condensed headline weight. A distinctive look for the numerals was also of prime importance and a Cyrillic character set complements the standard Roman alphabet.
Champions Regular, Bold and Headline fonts are exclusive to UEFA and will further strengthen the brand across all communications. It will be used not across all publications, but also for onscreen infographics, including the numbers of the clock as those excruciating seconds of injury time tick away!
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