Football fans are famously intrepid; matches invoke local, regional, and national pride. For Europe’s northernmost league, Finland’s Veikkausliiga, this means weathering (literally) a season from spring to fall, with temperatures ranging from summer highs in the 70s to a refreshing 45 degrees at the edges (it’s not uncommon for snow to make an appearance early and late in the season). Watching many a Veikkausliiga match, you’ll notice that regardless of team affinity, most fans have something in common: the scarf.
The scarf brings people together, both physically and symbolically. Whether worn around the neck or raised in the air, it’s deeply connected to football culture.
Jesper Bange, lead designer at BOND
Naturally, when the league tapped Helsinki studio BOND for a new brand identity, the team began its exploration with this iconic identifier.” Throughout Veikkausliiga’s new visual system, you’ll see nods to scarf-waving football enthusiasts from the logo to the wordmark to the brand typeface, Scarf Gothic.
“The scarf was chosen because it’s a universal symbol of football fandom. It represents passion, unity, and pride—core emotions tied to Veikkausliiga and its fans,” said the project’s lead designer, Jesper Bange.
Veikkausliiga’s new logo, designed by Toni Hurme, is a fan holding a scarf aloft.
Bange shared some of the team’s thinking, process, and inspiration, beginning with the idea to build the typeface from the shape of folded scarves. “Since the original logo also featured a fan holding a scarf, it felt natural to continue from there. We first worked with the symbolic scarf element,” Bange said. “When we saw how simple and iconic the symbol was, we felt the wordmark needed to be just as strong and distinctive.”
The process quickly evolved from there, and the team experimented with bending and shaping scarves to achieve the distinct wordmark. They loved it so much that they decided to develop a full character set and build a complete typeface designed by Toni Hurme and Teo Tuominen. The team used a mix of physical experimentation (with a ribbon, Bange explained) and digital tinkering to sketch the variations and character shapes.
Considering the angular nature of scarf folding, I wondered if Finnish diacritics or other script idiosyncrasies stumped the team along the way. Bange spoke about Finnish diacritics as pretty straightforward but said the umlauts needed a bit of imagination. “An easy design route would have been to use an octagonal character style like those seen in American collage typefaces, but we wanted something more unique and slightly odd—something that reflects the distinct character of Finnish football,” Bange explained.
It’s not the most well-known league in the world, so the typeface needed to feel just as unexpected and authentic.
Characters constructed from multiple strokes were also a creative challenge for the team. Bange admits that the first renditions felt too generic and boring. “We spent a lot of time refining them to make sure they were both distinctive and legible, so they’d belong to the same visual ‘family,’” he said. “Most importantly, they had to look like something that could realistically be constructed from scarves.”
Though this feature focuses on the incredible type design by Toni Hurme and Teo Tuominen, the brand system is impressive all around. The motion elements, which we’re particularly enamored with, dynamically incorporate patterns, bright colors, and the new typeface, evoking a football match’s energy and pace. View the entire project here, and on Instagram.
In addition to Jesper Bange, Toni Hurme, and Teo Tuominen, team BOND included Nils Kajander (lead creative), Kirill Ratman (design director), Arttu Salovaara (strategist), Salla Rehula (project manager), Timo Bontenbal (motion designer), Noora Kerminen (junior designer), and photographers Konsta Leppänen & Paavo Lehtonen.
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