Sky Sports has launched a new visual identity which is designed to move away from sports-specific sub-brands and attract new audiences.
The new look was launched at the start of the football season this summer, and was also used for its recent Ryder Cup coverage. It will roll out across other sports, from Formula One and darts to cricket, boxing and tennis, over the next 12 months.
“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.
Sky Sports last rebranded in 2017, when it shifted towards a channel architecture built around different sports, like 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.”
Another element of the brief was to attract a broader audience, particularly the under-35 age group. Much has been made of sport having to adopt more of the design cues of the entertainment world, as consumption habits change and the importance of short social clips increases.
But Haley says the Sky Sports team needed to balance that with what its channels do best.
“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.”
For the Sky Sports team, the challenge was not just to create consistency across its different sports, formats and touchpoints, but also to create an experience worth buying.
“Unlike the BBC or ITV, we’re selling a product,” Haley says. “So the branding needs to help justify the amount people are spending.”
That, Sampson explains, helped develop the new brand positioning – “Welcome to the show” – which he says underscores the “value Sky Sports adds.”
“Some broadcasters just rock up and point a few cameras at a sports event,” he says. “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.
The new Sky Sports visual identity, with the logo roundel used as a framing device
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 has also recently had its sheen removed).
“The actual proportions and everything are the same, but the textures within have changed,” Sampson says.
This has opened up different and more interesting visual treatments. One of Sky’s car parks in west London was wrapped with an image of a Formula One car speeding over the new logo.
“It has tire marks all over it, and that’s something we wouldn’t have been able to do before,” Haley says. He says the team is relishing “dialling up” this more emotional, fan-friendly side of the brand alongside the “premium experience and innovation we’re famous for.”
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.”
Sampson says the new typeface is designed to be “bold and iconic” and creates consistency across on-screen graphics, digital and advertising, while retaining flexibility.
“We didn’t want to be tied down to one execution of that typeface,” he says. “Different sports have different personalities, and even within sports, The Hundred is very different to test match cricket.
“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 Haley says they were inspired too by magazine covers. “We wanted the brand to feel more editorial in its design, and the confidence of the font is very robust.”
He says they paid particular attention to the numbers, because of the central role they play in sports coverage, from the constant on-screen presence of a football score to the celebratory moments of a six in cricket, or a 180 in darts.
“We had a lot of frank conversations internally,” Haley says. “Some people were a bit nervous that we were pushing it too far.”
To ensure every part of the brand expression is considered, Sky has some pretty specialist creative roles.
For example, Haley explains, its talent creative director, Francesca Gray-Walkinshaw, manages every aspect of how talent shows up on screen, “from styling, to production, to training around how we express our brand values.”
This matters, he says, because in a show like Super Sunday, Sky’s flagship football offering, around 50% of the transmission will be talent contextualising and discussing the action.
“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.”
The new Sky Sports visual identity, featuring Sky Sports Sans
The new Sky Sports visual identity, featuring Sky Sports Sans
The new Sky Sports visual identity, featuring Sky Sports Sans
The new Sky Sports visual identity
The new Sky Sports visual identity
The new Sky Sports visual identity
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