Challenge

Increase reach and relevance throughout the entire Olympic cycle

Team GB is a much-loved brand — ranking 2nd, just behind the NHS, in a survey of ‘what makes people proud of Britain’. But, whilst sentiment is strong and engagement is high during each summer or winter Games, the brand needed to work harder to drive increased relevance outside of Games time, particularly with younger audiences.

The brand needed to evolve strategically and visually. To develop a clear and compelling purpose and promise that could maintain the DNA of what has made it so successful, but also resonate deeper, across multiple channels, with athletes and audiences alike. It also needed to facilitate content that would engage and inspire the nation, not just during the Games, but every single day.

Insight

Embrace a truth that makes Olympic sport so unique

Elite sport, by its very nature, can be elitist. Elevating sportsmen and women into super-human stars. Putting them on a pedestal, out of touch with everyday life and out of reach from everyone else. But not the Olympic Games — and that’s why Team GB is different. At the heart of the brand has always been a simple but compelling observation: that when it’s at its best, Team GB helps and facilitates ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. This is what makes the brand so unique, its athletes so loved, and its stories so compelling. And it’s where we found our idea.

Idea

Everyday Extraordinary

With a simple evolution of the brand’s existing slogan ‘Believe in Extraordinary’, we’ve moved it away from an athlete-focussed rallying call and into an inclusive and inspirational articulation of the new purpose: To bring people together through the power of stories steeped in authenticity and emotion. To celebrate superhuman endeavours and the humanity that lies behind them. To champion what makes our athletes so special, as well as what grounds them. To show their rich diversity and unbreakable unity. And above all else, to unite and inspire our nation to find their own extraordinary.

A diverse design system

With the brand needing to move beyond Games time and start engaging audiences throughout the whole four year Olympic cycle, it was important that it had the flexibility to dial up and down, to represent the everyday as well as the extraordinary, and to resonate with a wide variety of different audiences.

To do this we created a simple but flexible design system all based around a core set of patterns. Inspired by some of the key qualities and attributes that make up a successful athlete, the patterns are intentionally expressive and abstract, meaning they can be applied freely across the brand without being nailed down to one particular sport.

The patterns are used in a variety of ways across the brand, ranging from simple, subtle applications on the more everyday end, to a set of full colour, event themed pattern illustrations on the extraordinary end.

Owning red, white and blue

As with many sport brands, colour was a point of contention. Obviously red, white and blue is synonymous with Great Britain, but it’s far from unique, with other competing nations such as France and USA also sporting the same colours. We needed to find a way of refreshing Team GB’s colour palette in a way that is both flexible and ownable.

Rather than trying to look beyond the traditional colours, we decided to embrace them and push the iconic red white and blue as far as we could. The result is a vibrant and varied colour palette that has the versatility to be restrained and traditional in one breath, and bold and contemporary in the next. The core palette is also complimented by the three other colours that go hand-in-hand with the Olympic Games; gold silver and bronze.

A Great British typeface

In a world full of heavy, condensed, sporty typography, we wanted to set Team GB apart with a far more approachable typeface. Working closely with typographer, Lewis McGuffie, we created Team GB Sans, a distinctive and flexible typeface with a classic British influence and a set of stylistic alternates that reflect movement, energy and diversity.

Continuing the theme of versatility, the typeface was designed to be clear and legible for everyday use, whilst having a dynamic and distinctive set of alternates for more extraordinary application.

Project disciplines

Brand strategy, brand architecture, brand identity, tone of voice, photography, illustration, animation, copywriting, brand guidelines brand rollout, brand guardianship.

Project collaborators

Typeface design: Lewis McGuffie