A-Leagues

Football in Australia is changing. Alongside R/GA Australia, we designed a suitably striking new font family for the innovative, all-inclusive A-Leagues. 

The A-Leagues represent the pinnacle of professional football in Australia. It’s the first league in the world to combine men's, women's, youth and e-sports competitions under one banner. It aims to make elite football the most popular sport in the country.

After the A-Leagues broke away from Football Australia in 2021, they were rebranded by R/GA Australia. As part of their box-fresh new kit, R/GA commissioned us to create custom lettering to match their new dynamic symbol.

Initially, we were asked to develop some type for the A-Leagues family of logos. However, the value of creating a full font family soon became apparent, so we put our boots on to create a hard-working and versatile typeface.

We used the 120° angle of the hexagon shape, often found on footballs and R/GA's new symbol as a starting point to create the A-Leagues font family. It’s a super font family with a wide variety of weights and styles.

Angular and dramatic, it looks gutsy and passionate in bold, yet beautiful and sophisticated in lighter weights. The small cuts and angled terminals play with your eyes, giving you the impression that the letters have been rendered in 3D. A-Leagues Text takes the core forms of the display styles and pairs them back as to not distract or render poorly at smaller sizes. This meant we gave the text style smaller bevels, looser spacing and a reduced x-height all to aid in legibility and readability.

We also created bespoke jersey numbers based on angularity and hexagonal shapes. In addition, the A-Leagues font family was supplied as a variable font, creating possibilities for interactive typographic animations such as reacting to crowd noise in stadiums. GOOOAL! Or for flexible typesetting, such as using its variable widths to counter the age-old issue of long or double-barrelled names having to be squeezed onto jerseys.