Systems, scores and circles: Smörgåsbord playfully unify BBC Football’s eclectic possibilities

“After extensive discussions with BBC Sport’s in-house design team, we opted to use Neue Plak,” Smörgåsbord’s Creative Director Dylan Griffith tells us, discussing the type chosen for the rebrand of BBC Football. The Amsterdam and Cardiff-based design studio favoured the sans serif’s capabilities over the BBC’s existing typeface. “It offered greater flexibility with its broad range of weights and cuts,” Griffith remarks, “from Compressed Hairline to Wide Extra Black,” meeting the comprehensive, detailed, and expansive demands of the project in hand – encapsulating Match of the Day, MOTD2, Football Focus, Final Score, MOTDX and Kickabout alongside a meticulous overarching brand system. “Neue Plak came into its own when displaying score lines, results and league tables,” he continues, “and for typographical compositions that had to be contained within 9:16 format screens as it’s spatially efficient,” meeting the conceptual and practical criteria behind the brand. “As we were also tasked with creating sub-brands for the programmes that sit within the BBC Football brand,” Griffith explains, “the extended cuts of Neue Plak helped greatly in allowing us to create distinction,” not letting a weight of the broad type family go to waste, whilst allowing the distinct personalities of each programme to shine through. Beyond the typographic treatment, Smörgåsbord’s approach to systematisation delivers an unrivalled consistency across BBC Football’s eclectic programming whilst embracing the elementary form at the project’s centre: the football. Harnessing its distinctive circular shape, contrary to BBC Sport’s sharp square visual language, the sphere sits front and centre of the brand system, individually adapting to each programme, medium and usage – from the smallest fixture detail to champion hero graphics.