“Sharper, edgier and more impactful”: 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.”