Nomad has crafted a looker of a facelift for Tottenham Hotspur

“We pride ourselves on being a Club of firsts; The first team to wear numbers on our shirts, the first non-league team to win the FA Cup, the first British team to win a European trophy – or two, and we wanted to harness that daring spirit the Club was built on for this project,” Kieran Murphy, Head of Creative & Brand at Tottenham Hotspur tells us about the undertaking to create the club’s hot new look. With a refreshed icon, a revived monogram and a remastered custom typeface, the club is looking sharper than ever before. The extensive project – which breathes new life into the historic club and the way it shows up in the world – was led by London-based design studio Nomad.

The opportunity was a bit of a dream project for Partner Terry Stephens. In a sense, the studio had to zoom out to get a view of the bigger picture of the club, before they could zoom in to the many elements that come together to form the Tottenham Hotspur brand, and then begin tweaking, changing and adjusting them. One of the highlights of the refresh is the club’s cockerel icon which has now been trimmed and cleaned down to its silhouette. “We developed a silhouette version of our cockerel, which works much better in digital spaces; this will help us be more creative with how our brand shows up and in everything we do,” says Murphy. “It helps us protect the heritage and value of the Club’s logo whilst creating something instantly recognisable – the cockerel could be built from fire, fur, metal, pink leopard-skin print, but you would know – that’s Spurs.” It’s true, the cockerel icon now works much harder, feels immediately modern, and can take on any materiality one could imagine.

“We worked closely with icon specialist Chris Mitchell (who illustrated the original badge 18 years ago) to enhance the proportions of the cockerel to be more legible at small sizes. This isn’t a replacement for the Club badge, it’s a new version that performs harder in the modern demands of a football club’s communications,” Stephens contextualises. “This new silhouette shape allows the Club to be more playful, filling it with colour and texture and giving THFC a new range of expression that can help reach a wide range of audiences.”

One of the biggest decisions of the facelift was to bring back the monogram, an iconic part of the club’s heritage that has been a part of its history since the 1950s (see: a glimpse of an archival black-and-white image of a ’50s game seen in one of the videos made by Native, with the monogram standing pride of place in the background). “I’m really excited about the possibilities of the new identity, but seeing the monogram back is a joy as a football fan and as someone in the branding world,” says Stephens. “It was a key identifier of the club to me throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, so to have the chance to reintroduce it feels great.” A fan favourite from the 1950s that went on to feature heavily on the Club’s badge for many years, the monogram – like the cockerel – was simplified and updated, in collaboration with Miles Newlyn.

A third set from the trifecta of elements that kick off this new chapter in the club’s visual history is the remastered custom typeface, which was first drawn “nearly 20 years ago, and has become synonymous with both the Club and brand. As such, we have evolved our typeface so that it retains its iconic and recognisable style, with a modern twist which is adaptable,” adds Murphy. “The original Spurs Display display face had great recognition, it just needed modernising and bringing in line with the new philosophy and overall creative direction of the Club. Sharper, edgier and more impactful,” says Stephens.

The team looked to the cockerel’s and the monogram’s details to bring in sharper, more exaggerated details to the typeface, as Stephen explains, “retaining the general look of the original Spurs font, but giving it a new lease of life.” But as the typeface of a truly modern club, it needed to be flexible and work much harder to respond to the demands of a digital world. “We wanted to create a variable font that could stretch to be more legible and impactful across extreme formats like LED ribbons inside the stadium,” says Stephens about the typeface that was crafted in close collaboration with F37 Foundry. The reimagined typeface, developed carefully, can now stretch forward and back, allowing for more expression. “F37 were the perfect partner for this – they brought our vision and sketches to life way beyond what we were expecting, pouring love and craft into the alt glyphs and ligatures that make the font so special.”

The studio also created a family of hallmarks to celebrate key heritage features, including the Seven Sisters Trees, Bruce Castle and 1882 – the Club’s founding year - to elevate the club’s ability to tell its story using a graphic voice. When brought together, the renewed elements, and the overarching visual refresh, signal a bright future for a club that’s poised for tomorrow.