“All the drama, urgency and romance of racing.” Gold Front’s brand puts Apex Wheels in pole position

Apex Wheels, a California-based company with over 15 years of experience, is not your typical wheel maker looking to make an easy buck. With a team of dedicated engineers who are also diehard motorsport enthusiasts, they create wheels that are not just about aesthetics but real performance. They take a stand against the unregulated wheel industry, striving against misleading claims and protecting motorsport enthusiasts from underperforming products.

Apex worked with San Francisco-based category design studio Gold Front to nail their reimagined brand image, aiming to put their wheels at the front of the pack. For both the brand and the studio, it was essential to highlight the problem customers were facing – a knowledge gap that companies were taking advantage of – and how Apex provides a solution with their “real performance” wheels, with its unrivalled performance-to-price ratio.

Drawing inspiration from unique typographic personalities in the racing world, the new branding uses bold, high-contrast colours and an eye-catching type system to ensure recognisability in all contexts. “We knew we wanted something that was extremely identifiable and differentiated at a glance,” explains Partner & Creative Director Josh Lowman. “There were a lot of established pockets of typographic personalities in the racing world – thin extended type that felt futuristic, rounded monolinear san serifs that felt like a racing track, and bold italics that had the attitude of a skate brand – and each felt like their own tribe.

In their research, the team came across printed ads for The Fox by Audi and were intrigued by the typesetting. “We are huge Lubalin and Tom Carnase fans, but we knew the slanted ‘A’ of ITC Avant Garde Gothic was a heavily tread-on trope in racing and evoked feelings of the BMW M series,” Lowman reveals, “Eliott Grunewald’s Herbus had such unique characteristics with these big sweeping curves of the cap ‘A’ and ‘S’ that, when set tightly, had all the drama, urgency, and romance of racing.” In the process of bringing the wordmark to life, Gold Front also drew inspiration from the typefaces Avant Garde Gothic, Serif Gothic, and Busorama. “Interestingly, Benetton’s iconic logo, while based on Gill Sans and designed by Joe Finocchiaro at Pentagram, was used for F1 and had a similar lowercase ‘e.’ The combination of the big sweeping ‘A’ and rotated lowercase ‘e’ gave the word a lovely rhythm that was lost in uppercase. It did a better job reflecting the driving experience we had at Sonoma Raceway which was a defining experience for the team.”

In addition to the custom wordmark, the design team selected a secondary typeface, Söhne by Klim Type Foundry, to complement their identity. As the “workhorse typeface” for the brand, Söhne was chosen for its technical precision, robustness, and versatility. It offered just the right balance, allowing the brand to toggle between technical precision and a softer tone that reflects the craft and performance of Apex’s wheels.

In the overall visual system, type takes the lead, with tight typesetting and animation used to create a visual narrative and bring the brand to life. By dynamically interacting with negative space and photography, this narrative unfolds across headlines and images, expanding and contracting to pace the story and maintain visual interest. Ultimately, the identity strikes the perfect balance between boldness and precision, embodying the spirit of the Apex brand.