LFFP custom

The brief

Images credit: https://www.instagram.com/lffpofficielle/

The birth on July 1, 2024 of the Ligue Féminine de Football Professionnel (LFFP) marks a turning point in the history of French soccer, and illustrates an unprecedented dynamic in favor of women's football. Placed under the aegis of the FFF, the League, chaired by Jean-Michel Aulas, operates with its own organization.

In order to identify this new organization with strength and elegance, the League and its communications agency are committed to the creation of a customized branding identity capable of being applied to all printed and digital communication media, and enabling the communication of the three capital missions: 

Influence: highlighting the success of clubs and the talent of players, and thus contributing to the performance of the French Women's Team, by inspiring new generations;
Leadership: embodying a discipline of excellence; 
Entertainment: bringing women's soccer to life as a popular spectacle from the stands or in front of the screens.

The solution

Blaze Type is already well acquainted with the sports sector, having signed the typefaces for Borussia Dortmund and Volleyball World.

The LFFP logo lays some interesting foundations with its use of cut-outs within the glyphs, referring as much to the brushstroke tracing the letter as to the cutting of ornamental stencils. In this graphic device, movement appears to reflect the dynamism of France's favorite sport.

Wishing to anchor the identity in a relatively neutral modernism, the agency opted for the Rules foundation, a neo-grotesk sans-serif to which these cut-outs are applied.

An initial test was carried out by the agency on the basis of four capitals with significant shapes: H, O, A and B. The Blaze Type team then corrected this proposal to unify the crosspieces, reduce their points and avoid excessively pronounced curves. Although this is a minor step for the customer and his supplier, it is essential in order to guarantee good legibility in small sizes, as well as good development on subsequent weights.

As much as capital letters incorporate tapering middle bars, a simple, dynamic graphic device, lowercase letters require more subtle, consistent work. With the exception of o, the whole alphabet adapts its counterforms to open up freely: a, b, d, e, g, p and q take on a slight spiciness and an interesting lightness, giving the whole a quasi-stencil status.

Although the main need is for Bold, Blaze Type is committed to providing a richly extended family, from Light to Black. Thus, an extended glyphset is deployed on all capitals, lower-case letters, diacritics covering extended Latin, punctuation and various common symbols. Particular attention is paid to numbers and fractions corresponding to the various championship stages. Once these two extreme weights have been completed, their interpolation generates the set of intermediate weights, Regular and Bold.

While today's communications use mainly capitals and Bold, the deployment of this typeface in a wide range of weights on commercial texts allows us to broaden our identity to include typographic games that reflect the richness and variety of this discipline.

In the space of around three months, and after natural and restricted exchanges, 4 weights for a total of 1,652 glyphs were developed.