For their virtual reality shooter Vail VR, distributed by Meta and Steam, Aexlab entrusted us with creating a set of graphic letterings and a wearable merchandise collection. Our designs visually materialize the identities of the game’s two opposing factions, who fight for the claim to humanity’s legacy in a sci-fi future of the solar system. Appealing with enigmatically tribalistic symbolism, they evoke a strong sense of identity making the game distinct and memorable.
skaladesign.ch/vail
For Air Max Day Zurich, Nike entrusted us with creating the promotional campaign and scenography across the event’s various digital and physical spaces. Playing with breathing shapes and the depths of universal space, our design fuses Air Max Dn’s dynamism with the theme of ‘alternate reality’. With spatial interventions blurring the boundaries of the factual, it unfolds a fascinating world that engages the community in celebrating street culture.
www.skaladesign.ch/nike-air-max-day
As On reached 1 million followers on Instagram, we were asked by the iconic Swiss shoe brand to create a celebratory animation expressing the brand’s core values in captivating visuals. Our animation presents On as a catalyst for movement. It is a tribute to the great Swiss tennis player Roger Federer and his affiliation with the brand. In a dynamic exchange of diverse patterns, the idea of togetherness is emphasized: individual actions that converge into a collective movement.
TO PLAY reads St. Andrew’s Playground as a living visual system shaped by movement, repetition, and change. Through observation and mapping, Yura Kang translates its shifting textures, rhythms, and spatial relationships into a graphic language that traces how energy circulates through the site, exploring play as a continuous act of movement, interaction, and belonging.
The 204 Type-Gazette is the annual publication of the Department of Typography and Typeface Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. It showcases eleven typefaces from the past two semesters.
In the sixth issue, typography is linked to the world of a wide variety of sports balls. On the 33 double-page spreads, a colourful, athletic aesthetic is explored to showcase the typefaces from their most sporty side.
In HO25, Nike asked us to conceive and design an experience that brought the global TOMA platform to Casablanca on the eve of the AFCON kickoff.
Morocco / Sami Moubtakir
Morocco / Laeticia Schwendi Dhah
Senegal / Audrey D’Erneville
Egypt / Kareem Lofty
Nigeria / Wekaforé Jibril
Ivory Coast / Obou Gbais
Angola / Benigno Mangovo
Ghana / Mattia Guarnera
South Africa / Babyfiend
On the world’s biggest stage, who will Steal the Show?
For SPSU26, Nike asked us to unlock how each Nike-sponsored European Federation will Steal the Show and to develop the creative direction and execution for the National Team Kit campaigns – FA chasing a star with Guts 2 Glory, KNVB igniting a new era with Oranje Uprising, and NFF giving everything with Ta Alt For Alle.
On the world’s biggest stage, who will Steal the Show?
For SPSU26, Nike asked us to unlock how each Nike-sponsored European Federation will Steal the Show and to develop the creative direction and execution for the National Team Kit campaigns – FA chasing a star with Guts 2 Glory, KNVB igniting a new era with Oranje Uprising, and NFF giving everything with Ta Alt For Alle.
“disqualifying type” explores failure through the language of sport, translating moments of defeat, mistakes and setbacks into a typographic system. The publication combines sporting terminology with experimental editorial design to question how failure is perceived, categorized and communicated.
A new visual identity for the thirtieth anniversary of the football club Toro Miramare. The identity is developed from the concept of the waves of the sea in Rimini, which are imprinted on the jersey through typography.
The DFB-Pokal thrives on contrast: professional clubs facing semi-professional sides, favourites meeting underdogs, and decades of tradition colliding with stories that can unfold in a single night. Its new visual identity seeks to make that tension visible. Introduced for the 2026/27 season, the rebrand brings the men’s, women’s and junior competitions into a shared design system while giving each its own character and expression. At the heart of the new approach is a fundamental question: how can a brand built on consistency capture a competition defined by unpredictability? In this interview, Holger Merk, Head of Brand Department, discusses the thinking behind the new identity, the role of contrast, the balance between tradition and digital culture, and how design can create a framework flexible enough to let the drama of the Pokal take centre stage.
The DFB-Pokal is Germany’s oldest football cup competition, spanning professional clubs down to semi-professional teams. This August, the Pokal received a completely new visual identity for the first time in a decade. Was the broader DFB rebrand from December 2025 the primary catalyst, or did the Pokal need its own distinct strategy? And what qualities of the competition ultimately drove the design direction?
We didn’t start with the question of how the DFB-Pokal should look. We started by asking what the competition means to people. The broader DFB rebrand created a shared framework, but the need for change came from the competition itself. The Pokal has a unique cultural role within German football. It creates stories, rituals and memories that connect generations. Our challenge was to translate that identity into a contemporary visual language while keeping it firmly connected to the wider DFB brand system. The result is a brand that feels unmistakably like the Pokal, while contributing to a larger DFB design language.
The new Pokal brand keeps emphasizing contrasts: tradition against modernity, grassroots against professional… This isn’t only a brand or marketing language, but seems to be structurally embedded in the design itself. Can you walk us through how visual contrast operates in the new system? How does a designer translate the character of the competition itself into typography, color, or form?
Contrast is part of the DNA of the DFB-Pokal. Professional clubs meet amateurs. Favourites meet underdogs. Long-standing tradition meets entirely new stories. Rather than resolving those tensions, the design system makes them visible. We use typography, colour, motion and composition as tools to express the competition’s inherent contrasts. At the same time, shared DFB elements ensure that the Pokal remains part of a consistent umbrella brand. The goal wasn’t visual consistency for its own sake. It was creating a system capable of expressing the many different realities of cup football.
The rebrand explicitly aims to reach “younger fans” through digital channels and social media, where they experience the Pokal differently than stadium audiences do. What assumptions are you making about how younger people consume football, and how do those assumptions change the design?
We don’t think the challenge is that younger people love football less. They simply build relationships differently. Today, football culture is experienced across many touchpoints: matches, creators, gaming, fashion, music and social media. The question therefore isn’t how to make the Pokal younger. The question is how the Pokal can remain meaningful within those environments. Design helps by making the competition more visible, more understandable and more adaptable to the places where football culture happens today.
Also how did you balance preserving what cannot change against the pressure to feel “more urgent” and “louder” for younger audiences? How did you manage this change, and avoid alienating either the legacy audience or the institutions within the DFB itself? What were the non-negotiables in the new design?
Before changing anything, we identified what gives the competition its meaning. The trophy, the traditions, the idea of the unexpected and the emotional intensity of knockout football were all non-negotiable. Modernisation didn’t mean replacing those assets. Pokal green and the established stadium experience for example remain important anchors. What we changed is the range of expression around those elements. The brand can now become much louder, faster and more disruptive where the context allows it, especially digitally. We often say that our task isn’t to change the tradition of the Pokal. Our task is to enable more people to participate in it.
The rebrand brings the men’s, women’s and junior Pokal competitions together under a shared design system, while still giving each its own identity. What’s the core balance you’re trying to strike between visual unity and differentiation? And how does each competition remain recognizable within that shared language?
The principle was simple: one culture, multiple expressions. All three competitions share the same strategic foundation and belong to the same DFB-Pokal world. At the same time, each competition has its own history, communities and symbols. We wanted equality rather than uniformity. The shared system creates recognition, while the individual trophy marks ensure that every competition retains its own identity and character.
How will you measure whether the rebrand has actually worked after the 2026/27 season? Will it be reach, recognition and engagement, or are you looking for something harder to quantify, such as a changed perception or feeling around the Pokal brand?
Metrics matter, of course. But the more interesting question is whether the rebrand helps the Pokal remain culturally relevant. The competition already enjoys extraordinary awareness. The challenge is maintaining meaning across generations. Success therefore means that people recognise the competition, understand what makes it unique and feel invited to become part of its stories, rituals and traditions. If more people can build their own relationship with the Pokal, the rebrand has done its job.
The DFB-Pokal rebrand leans heavily on the idea that the competition is fundamentally about moments – a single goal that changes everything, an underdog team nobody expected to win – it is tension and, above all, pure surprise. But design systems are built on consistency and repetition. How do you create a system that feels surprising and emotionally charged when it must function reliably across broadcasters, clubs, social platforms, and merchandise?
Design systems are often associated with consistency, but the DFB-Pokal is defined by unpredictability. We approached this tension by creating clear codes rather than rigid layouts. The trophy, typography, colours and motion language provide recognition, while scale, pace and storytelling remain flexible. In that sense, the system behaves less like a template and more like a framework for participation. It creates enough structure to build a brand, while leaving enough freedom for the competition’s drama, surprise and emotion to unfold.
Posters and visual concepts PFW PROGRESSION RUN & PFW SUMMER TUNES for @techuntermagazine x @soar_running
The work explores the collective experience of being a passionate sports fan: visiting games, supporting home teams, and sharing the stories and emotions carried by sport, memory, and childhood. It brings together faces from different homes and backgrounds, reflecting how a shared attachment can connect people who might otherwise never meet. Through this collective experience, the work considers belonging, identity, and the power of shared stories.
The 2008 Wimbledon Final was either the greatest match ever played or an absolutely unreasonable amount of tennis, depending on how you look at it.
For TEMPER’s Victory Edition, the final point was broken down into sixty frames. Each one became an individual risograph label for one of sixty bottles. One frame per bottle, each one unique.
Terzo Tempo examines the evolution of typographic design on football jerseys, tracing how numbers transformed from purely functional elements into meaningful symbols of identity and cultural significance. Through historical research, the project shows how jerseys became economically and culturally relevant artifacts. Typography shapes how players and teams are perceived, influencing a team’s image. This exploration led to the development of sixteen typeface and ultimately to Synthe Type.
Pages from the Brazilian sports magazine were scanned, fragmented and reorganized into a series of collages. Photographs, typography and traces of the original print are combined with fields of color, transforming archival material through cutting, displacement and reconstruction.
Caught between exercise addiction and body shaming, taking time to rest, slow down and recharge. You need this, you earned this: Take the break.
Originally, Vallon was drawn at Travaux-Pratiques for the signage system of the Grande Traversée du Massif Central (GTMC), a 1,380 km-long mountain biking route across France, from Avallon to Cap d’Agde. Formally, it is a nod to the old Michelin road signs and hand-painted lettering that are characteristic of the French typographic landscape. Vallon is currently available with a complete glyphset in three styles: Extended, Normal, and Condensed, as well as a variable font.
Cycling jersey designs for Heavy Pedal.
Photos: Danny Upshaw Models: Destiny Carson, Jordan Ware, Matias & Tiffany Tabourne
Cycling jersey designs for Heavy Pedal.
Photos: Danny Upshaw Models: Destiny Carson, Jordan Ware, Matias & Tiffany Tabourne
Cycling jersey designs for Heavy Pedal.
Photos: Danny Upshaw Models: Destiny Carson, Jordan Ware, Matias & Tiffany Tabourne
The Budapest UEFA Poster was published in 2021 in the Collectors Album European Championship 2020, a collectible stickers album. The Tschutti Heftli Team, dedicated to promoting the cultural side of football, invited one artist from each participating city to reflect on their city through a poster. The resulting UEFA City Posters series was created in collaboration with Weltformat, presenting football and the participating cities through contemporary artistic perspectives.
The Budapest UEFA Poster was published in 2021 in the Collectors Album European Championship 2020, a collectible stickers album. The Tschutti Heftli Team, dedicated to promoting the cultural side of football, invited one artist from each participating city to reflect on their city through a poster. The resulting UEFA City Posters series was created in collaboration with Weltformat, presenting football and the participating cities through contemporary artistic perspectives.
The identity is built as a flexible visual system that evolves with the host region each year. A changing gradient palette gives every edition its own colour character, while a custom brush typeface and expressive strokes bring movement, energy and a human touch to the digital visual language. Authentic athlete photography captures effort, tension and joy. Together, these elements create a recognisable identity that can transform annually without losing its core.