Fulham Football Club
Established in 1879, Fulham FC’s history goes back quite a ways. It was with this in mind that the Club and brand guardians Heavenly sought to bring the team’s visual identity up to date, enlisting Colophon to create a hardy stencil typeface that would initially emblazon jerseys and shape the team’s logotype, all while functioning alongside the Club’s classic ‘FFC’ crest. After that, the type would go on to pair with several other retail fonts as a general-use, versatile headline face across various touchpoints.
To that end, we proposed a duo of bold types that were each cut and stenciled uniquely on behalf of different scales and use-cases. Derived from the same ‘parent’ type, Fulham First employs a lean hairline incision for instances in which type is to be displayed quite large and / or seen up close; Fulham Substitute amplifies that incision and provides a more generous aperture for situations in which type will appear quite small and / or is to be viewed from far away.
For the latter cut, the eye then ‘completes’ the letterforms due to the type’s distance-from-subject, printing process, or manufacturing method.
In addition, certain letterforms take stylistic liberties in cut-placement, adding visual interest when the two types appear in close proximity to one another. Apart from these subtle differences, letterforms were intentionally kept quite neutral and in the modernist tradition, so as not to detract from legibility and the overall effect (both functional and visual) of the stencil.
This duo of optical stencils, as we came to call them, is either one typeface functioning as two or two typefaces functioning as one, depending on vantage point.
While several digital files were ultimately delivered to the commissioners, the mathematical structure or skeleton of both ‘weights’ is and was identical, providing an economical solution to a pervasive problem that the client didn’t know they had. The end result is at once classic and current, fixed and fluid.
Typeface: Fulham First XI / Fulham Substitute
Commissioner: Heavenly / Fulham Football Club
Year: 2013
2 Styles: First XI, Substitute
Coverage: Latin-A Encoded
Classification: Stencil Sans Serif
URL: fulhamfc.com