Fulham Football Club is proud to introduce an evolved brand identity, built around one of Craven Cottage’s most distinctive pieces of architecture.
Shaped with the Club’s long-term retained creative agency Music, the work responds to a changing relationship between football clubs and their audiences.
Following a period of extensive research and development, remaining true to the Club’s heritage provides the basis of the identity; Craven Cottage itself is at the centre of the new creative direction.
A piece of hand-rendered lettering found within the fabric of the stadium, situated on the side of the Club’s iconic home – a landmark in football – became the starting point for the development of a bespoke typeface, named “FFC Original”.
Rather than treating history as something to reproduce nostalgically, the typography is the foundation for a broader modern design system — allowing the Club’s personality to move naturally between matchday, digital content, commercial and business communications, retail, hospitality and campaigns.
The result is an identity designed to feel unmistakably original, and unmistakably Fulham.
The Modern Original
The Modern Original
Dave Simpson, CEO and Executive Creative Director at Music, said: “We’ve worked with Fulham for a long time, which means this didn’t begin with a desire to redesign everything. It began with understanding what was changing around the Club and asking how the brand could become more distinctive without losing the things people already loved about it.
"Craven Cottage gave us the answer. The lettering within the stadium had all the character we were looking for — it was genuinely Fulham, rather than something applied to Fulham. Building the creative direction around that allowed us to connect the history of the Club with a much more contemporary and expressive visual language.
"For me, that’s the most interesting part of the project.
"The idea and the expression are the same thing. It isn’t heritage sitting alongside a modern identity; the heritage is what creates the modern identity.”
We Live By The River
We Live By The River
Jack Burrows, Marketing Director, Fulham Football Club, said: “Our club has grown significantly in recent years and so have the number of ways in which people experience us.
"We’re speaking to lifelong supporters, new fans, local and international audiences as well as hospitality guests, each through very different channels and touchpoints. Some of these groups may attend matches regularly, others may never set foot inside Craven Cottage.
"That creates enormous opportunity, but it also makes having a clear and recognisable identity that feels culturally relevant and adaptable for a digital world increasingly important.
"This work gives us something that feels contemporary enough to support our growth whilst remaining vitally authentic – the brand is rooted in the true original character of Fulham and Craven Cottage. It now allows us to remain consistent, but also much more agile and expressive.”
Type foundry F37 were engaged to translate the architectural reference into a functioning type system.
Working from the original lettering of the Craven Cottage mural, the characters were developed into a font capable of performing across varying Club communications while retaining the quirks and personality which made the source material interesting in the first place.
Fulham FC Typeface
Fulham FC Typeface
The identity is now appearing across Fulham’s communications and assets, flexing seamlessly across digital and matchday graphics to campaigns, retail and moving image.
Alongside the bespoke typography, the evolved identity builds on the Club’s status as London’s first professional football club (“London’s Original football club”) not simply as a heritage claim, but – as the Club moves towards its 150th anniversary – with permission to behave with confidence and originality today.