How to successfully use Athletic Branding to out lean your competition
Some Succesful Logo’s I’ve created (Black and white version)
Hey there, I'm Zach Litoff, an ex-division 1 XC and track runner with a passion for design. With over 6 years of experience in the industry and 4 years at an agency, I've learned how crucial effective branding is for sports and athletics-related businesses. In this article, I'll share my personal insights on how to design winning branding that connects with your audience and elevates your brand to new levels. So whether you're a gym, sports team, or athletic apparel brand, you’ll want to read on.
Getting the right branding is especially crucial for an athletics brand because the sports industry is highly competitive and relies heavily on a strong brand identity and reputation. Effective branding can help an athletics brand to stand out in a crowded market and connect with its target audience in a meaningful way.
Athletics brands often have a strong emotional connection with their audience, as sports can inspire passion, loyalty, and excitement. A well-crafted brand identity, including logos, colors, typography, messaging, and overall visual style, can tap into this emotional connection and help to build a deeper relationship with customers. This can translate to increased brand loyalty, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
So the real question becomes how do you effectively design branding elements that match the excitement and passion that is in the sports world? Well, here’s a short checklist you're going to want to make sure your following:
Consider the target audience
Consider color
Use appropriate typography
Make it versatile
Create a complete brand identity
1. Consider the Target Audience:
So as a designer or brand, how do you design toward your target audience? You have to look both externally at who’s already engaging with that brand and look internally at your company’s culture.
If you only design for those who are already engaging with said company, you'll miss out on potentially huge sections of the market; if you only design based on what those people want, your branding will blend in with every other corporate tech company and lack any feeling of authenticity.
The trick is designing for the target audience while blending in the company's true vibe.
Applying that to the athletics world:
Let's say the target audience is more those 20-mile LR serious runners. You don't want to just make high-quality, high-performance-looking designs. For example, Bandit Running is a brand known for sweet apparel and great socks, and a sweet vibe. They took this target market into consideration, but they also looked internally. They were the cool kids of NYC and they made sure to never lose that hype beast, “yeah we're cool, so what” attitude in their branding. The designs are based around that, but they never forget their target audience in any of their branding. It always screams high-performance, elite running.
2. Consider Color
Color is especially important in athletics-related brands. You have Adidas in black and white. You have the orange shoe box from Nike. You may not notice it but these colors act almost as a logo in its most basic form. While those are examples of good uses of color, I want to remind everyone of the 2012 London Olympics.
While Mo Farah was winning gold in his home stadium, millions of viewers were cringing every time the logo was displayed. The logo featured a color palette of pink, orange, blue, green, and purple. The color scheme was intended to reflect the diversity and energy of the games. But… it missed and missed hard.
Applying that to the athletics world:
While in theory these designs could have been a good use of color, they forget the most important key - to actually look good. In the athletics world, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of the sport. There’s so much raw emotion and so many good metaphors you could use as designs. The best advice I can give is:
Pick colors that both look good, and carry the metaphorical meaning that matches the brand
3. Use appropriate typography
There’s no single correct answer to what the correct font line-up for your brand is. There are infinite fonts out there, and so many creative pairings. I recommend picking multiple diverse fonts that can pair well and fit multiple aspects of your brand. An easy route is one handwritten/script t, one san serif, and one serif font. Yet, you should 100% break this rule when needed. Also, makes sure you think of Step 1, think of your audience and your brand’s true culture, during this process
The hard part becomes figuring out what mix of these font options you should incorporate into your design.
this is where knowing the brand and having a plan becomes crucial.
For example, if your brand is edgy, you could try out an edgy font. However, you could also show that edginess through other branding elements like logos or colors. If every aspect of your design screams edgy, you either have a really small, really edgy target audience or you’re doing something wrong.
Applying that to the athletics world:
A great example of a good font line-up is Tracksmith.
Tracksmith is a company that defines itself as a New England brand. They try to be a bit more fancy and high-class than Nike or Bandit. They’re clean. They’re a modern take on old fashion. And they have a great selection of fonts.
First, for their logo, they have a custom script font. Scripts work great in titles because they’re flowing decorative style is harder to read at lower point sizes. They also tend to attract a lot of attention. They used a custom script that looks modern enough to be a logo, but traditional enough that it looked like John Handcock could have been involved in the process. This is perfect for Tracksmith.
Next for their primary header font, they use Sainte Colombe. This is an elegant serif font that basically acts as a more creative Times New Roman. Sainte Colombe, unlike Times New Roman, isn’t driven by symmetry and is actually much more expressive. This is a perfect metaphor for Tracksmith - a brand that appears to be this fancy high-class brand but is actually breaking rules and acting almost like a high-class imposter.
Finally, for their secondary font (used in buttons and CTA’s on their website), they use Akzidenz-Grotesk. This is a classic Swiss industrial font. which sounds like it wouldn’t pair well. Kudos to the brand designer because when paired with Tracksmith's autumn colors and elegant logo and other branding elements, it loses its working-class touch and finds itself pairing perfectly with the likes of Sainte Colombe. Again, this perfectly fits the metaphor I made before - “acting almost like a high-class imposter.”
4. Make it versatile
Branding needs to be versatile. Branding elements will be used to communicate the company’s message and identity across a wide range of applications and contexts.
For athletics companies, this is especially important because you need branding elements that can convey messages, brand values, identity, and messaging across different products, services, and experiences. For example, an athletics company likely produces products, works with athletes, and hosts events. Your branding needs to be able to adapt to all of these while still maintaining its core identity.
A good way to do this is to create multiple versions of your assets. in ordering hierarchy.
Applying that to the athletics world:
An easy example of this is Nike and the swoosh. At its base, the swoosh stands for everything Nike is. As you branch out within Nike, that swoosh remains although it’s changed. For example, Nike has the pinwheel logo, the Nike trail logo, and the Nike ACG logo. All of these different uses of the swoosh apply to different aspects of Nike’s identity. Yet, they all remain at their core NIKE. This would be an example of a versatile branding element - with just making a couple small tweaks, the swoosh works everywhere.
5. Create a Complete Brand Identity
The saddest thing I hear from a company is when they only want a logo. A brand is so much more than a logo. In the athletics industry, which is highly competitive and relies heavily on a strong brand identity and reputation, having a logo without branding will get you almost nowhere.
Consistency is key for effective branding, and with only a logo, your brand will lack consistency. If users see an image that lacks company branding, how will they know who’s advertising to them? This is why at bear minimum I always demand my clients at least get a minimal brand guide consisting of colors and typography.
If you want a truly successful brand you’ll at least need consistency across things like photography, videography, brand messaging, and brand voice, as well as the basics of logos colors and fonts.
A full brand identity tells you and shows you how you should display your brand. As the designer, it’s your role to design the persona of the brand and write out a guide to the company on how they execute your strategy. If you need some examples, here is the brand guide I did for a trail company named Trail Magic and one for an athletics team named Lakewood Athletics.
Wrapping it up:
If you’ve read all the way to the end, wow go you! If you can do everything above successfully, your branding will succeed within this wild industry, the company will start generating buzz and awareness, and it will begin to grow to the next level.
If you have any other questions Contact me. Here at Litoff Studios, I specialize in branding and my niche is athletics companies. Let’s work together and I’ll help push your brand to world records..
