FC Zenit 95th Anniversary Advertising Campaign
In 2020, FC Zenit celebrates its ninety-fifth birthday. Over the years the club has seen many victories of different scale. Third place in the city championship, playing in the finals of the All-Union Championship, the USSR Cup of 1944, gold at the National Championship won forty years later, the UEFA Cup and the Super Cup in 2008. The inspiring identity and advertising campaign were designed to reflect the significance of the achievements and inspire players and fans for future victories.
The Concept
The northern location of the city, Zenit’s amazing results and its role as an element of national pride led to an elegant and dynamic idea: the main element of the concept should be the northern lights! They shine continuously, never stop moving and serve as an excellent metaphor.
Aurora became the core of the identity and from now on will be featured in the system of the club’s communication throughout the anniversary celebrations.
The Identity
The beauty familiar to the inhabitants of the north has reached Saint Petersburg, bringing the northern lights everywhere: to the streets, stadiums and mobile screens.
The aurora borealis lives a life of its own, continuously changing its shape and content. The mirror surface reflects the exciting moments of matches, figures of key players of the past and present or simply views of the city, depending on the chosen photos and textures.
To make sure working with the image is easy for any designer, we came up with a special interface. All you need to do is choose one of the thirty pre-designed versions, define the angle, add beautiful pictures, apply effects and you have an aurora that is unlike any other.
The tool allows to create an infinite number of static and dynamic designs and use them to decorate images and videos for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and everything else. Fans will definitely never get bored.
The diverse images look equally great on t-shirts and on giant stadium screens. The northern lights are always relevant and eye-catching.
The Type
The typeface used on the project contains two styles. Each letter has both a wide and a narrow version, allowing any headline to look like the result of painstaking work of a designer. In reality, all letters are chosen dynamically as they are typed, thanks to a clever tool developed at the studio. It evaluates the total length of the text and forms a combination of symbols according to its own algorithm, giving the media the beauty of a carefully designed poster.
Shine on, great club
The typeface includes Cyrillic letters and numbers, everything you need to create memorable headlines and catchy slogans.
With such a typeface at their disposal, a designer, editor or typesetter can quickly create an original type composition without special training.
The typeface look great in headlines
The new grotesque face is perfect for highlighting names of the best players and announcing significant events. Studio’s Gauss typeface is used for longer texts.
The stars
The symbol of the stars was created to represent the memorable date. They are used to brand the club’s products: t-shirts, balls, scarves, pennants and other equipment and also look great as design elements and emoji in social networks and email.
Zenit will continue to shine brighter every year, so it’s important to ensure that individual elements of the identity can be replaced while maintaining the overall style.
The new identity turned out bright and unpredictable, just like the game itself. You never know which combination is going to make a perfect play the next time.
designer, motion designer and video effects designer
designer and type designer
- From Zenit
editors
- Evgeny Grigorenkov
- Valery Shchedrinsky
The studio wishes to thank FC Zenit media team for their help with the project.
