The club renews its colours with a renewed visual identity created in collaboration with Dragon Rouge
A football club’s heritage is intrinsic to its identity, and Southampton FC’s new brand is no exception. The club, founded in 1885 and based at St Mary’s Stadium, has made its history the focal point of its renewed identity. In collaboration with branding firm Dragon Rouge, the club, known colloquially as Saints, has evolved its visual rules to move forward in a digital age.
An initial audit of the logo, which had not been updated for several years, found that it had become “fractured and disconnected from its existing strategic priorities”, says Fabiola Wilcox, Southampton FC’s director of logo and communications expertise.
The brand previously used a diverse range of styles and an inconsistent presentation, which resulted in an incohesive identity system across the board. To create more harmony, Dragon Rouge honoured one key visual asset: the Saints’ iconic stripes.
Acting as a symbolic marker, the stripes breathe life into the branding in a bold and expressive way. Focusing on the ‘power of five’ concept, the design team applied the stripes using three different approaches, each of which aligns with a different value of the club.
The ‘Core’ stripes pay homage to the Saints’ old kit, the ‘Positive’ stripes aim to highlight optimism and the ‘Dynamic’ stripes express the club’s confidence in its project to ‘become excellence’.
Red Dragon incorporated stripes into the rebranding so that Saints fans can easily identify the club’s communications without having to use their crest. Although some appear in black or white, sometimes they are red, which is Southampton FC’s main colour.
They now feature on the Saints’ new merchandise, and across the club’s social media and digital apps. The aim here, Wilcox says, was to create “a simple yet future-proof system that incorporates our tone of voice and brings new flexibility and energy to our famous five stripes”.
The rest of the design has a sleek yet old-fashioned effect. After the initial audit that highlighted that the Saints’ multiple typefaces were used in every and every way imaginable, adding outline, 3D, hint/input, and italics, the club’s base font was retained. as the source of the name, while the virtual font was replaced and is used more consistently throughout the identity. The rebranding is now fully implemented in Southampton FC’s day-to-day communications.
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