Sky Sports new look was introduced at the start of the football season this summer and was also used for the recent Ryder Cup broadcast, and will be rolled out to other sports over the next 12 months, from Formula 1 and darts to cricket, boxing and tennis.
“Sky Sports is a beast, so it’s an ever-evolving piece of work,” – says Alex Haley, Sky’s group creative director of brand design.
The Sky Sports brand was last rebranded in 2017, when the channel architecture was based around different sports, such as Sky Sports Premier League and Sky Sports Cricket.
“We wanted to create identities for each of those channels, so we had different colour palettes and we created new typefaces,” explains Ceri Sampson, Sky’s group executive creative director of brand and design.
“They were almost their own little sub-brands, but it almost worked too well, and the success of those genre channels was to the detriment of Sky Sports itself. We wanted to re-establish the main brand and put the love back into Sky Sports.”
“There is so much choice in sports now, and so many formats,” he says. “But for us, live is still king. It’s the centrepiece of the experience, but of course everything that wraps around live has become more relevant, to engage fans beyond the 90 minutes, or the in-ring action.”
“We always want people to watch live, because that’s the best and purest experience. But the way to get them there perhaps isn’t as traditional as it was 15 years ago.”
“Some broadcasters just rock up and point a few cameras at a sports event,” – says Ceri Sampson. “But that’s not us. It’s always been about really premium additions, from the best commentators, to the best cameras, to the best brand and graphic design package that sits around any programme.”
This focus on presentation influenced the evolution of the Sky Sports logo. “We deconstructed it to create what we’ve called the stage device, where the roundel becomes a vehicle to represent the stories we’re telling,” Haley says.
They’ve also removed the logo’s glass sheen, which Sampson says had become “a cold barrier working against our positioning of welcoming everybody.” (The Sky master logo also recently had its sheen removed).
One of the biggest parts of the new identity is a new typeface, Sky Sports Sans, which comes in five weights and was developed with the F37 foundry. This replaces the six sports-specific fonts created as part of the 2017 rebrand.
“Each had its own tone and visual quirks, but they shared some key limitations – they were all-caps, only available in a single weight, and each was a modified version of an external typeface,” F37’s Rick Banks explains. “This created brand inconsistency and limited Sky’s creative control.”
“So we want that font to flex, and things like the motion principles of how we animate it will change from sport to sport.”
Banks says Sky Sports Sans is built for “warmth, clarity and versatility” with “angular cuts, sharp terminals and pointed vertices” referencing dynamism and energy.
“And so from our point of view, having someone who is able to understand the personalities, the presentation, and what we want to achieve with the brand, is really interesting,” Haley says.
“It’s quite a unique part of what branding means in this space, beyond the typical stuff of identities and toolkits.”
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