Playlist: Sports & athletics

Women in Rugby is a campaign launched by World Rugby in order to give visibility to a sport rarely seen under the female lens. These last few years, rugby gained in popularity among women, because of the values this sport promotes: particularly, its great collective spirit, which was the starting point of the campaign entitled “Team powered”. The aim of the campaign was to inspire new audiences and help women’s rugby become more mainstream. DesignStudio spent time with coaches, players and other actors of the field in order to determine what made this sport so unique. The answer was that it’s one of the most inclusive and welcoming sports there is: therefore, DesignStudio conceived a joyful campaign, seen as a celebration of the team spirit, with a focus on community and diversity in a group of women. To do so, the designers collaborated with Argentinian illustrator Xoana Herrera, who created a set of characters with unique characteristics, who nevertheless combine into colorful patterns, showing a collective energy. The campaign typography uses Media Sans from Production Type. Its assertive design and its contrasted boldness are well-suited for direct messages, such as the headlines of Women in Rugby. On posters, social media videos, panels, or even rugby balls, Media Sans Extended Black can’t be missed. What’s more, the typeface finds a perfect counterpart in the illustrations by Xoana Herrera, as their color blocks nicely echo the thickness of the letters.

Race Across Skåne is a sportive cycling event that takes riders from one coast to the other and back again, over 191km. The 2015 edition of Race Across Skåne employed new releases from Production Type and Grilli Type. The uncommon backslant has a specific history in cartography, namely marking out maps of water, but I was drawn to Origin Super Condensed’s forms for their perceived speed. GT Cinetype mirrored the rudimentary vector path on the website, and the dimensions and open counters made it a great typeface for the rest of the site.

Social Bite is a non-profit organization that works towards ending homelessness. Started as a small café employing homeless people, the organization grew to raise funds and create different kinds of support through events such as sleep outs and the organization of food provisions. Their main realization is the Social Bite Village, a group of eleven prefabricated houses located in a vacant lot in Edinburgh, hosting the homeless and helping their reinsertion. Their latest fundraising event is Break the Cycle, a cycling race starting from Glasgow and finishing in Edinburgh. The goal of the contest is to raise enough money to create two more Social Bite villages, to be able to help more people. The identity of Break the Cycle was designed by Happy Place. The illustrative approach to the identity makes it accessible to anyone: besides, the use of a color palette related to sports makes it easier for some cycling contesters to identify with the goal of the race. The identity is all set with Stratos from Production Type: the bold italic caps, repeating the words, express velocity and at the same time let us feel the repetition and the gears at work behind homelessness. The studio designed two brochures, a training guide and a fundraising pack, and the website of the event, where we can see the itinerary and all different ways of investing money into the contest. The event will take place on 5 September 2021.