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the reworked Club Santos Laguna wordmark in white over a dark photograph of an empty floodlit pitch, with a gold halo over the S

Santos Laguna

Project Personal, concept only

Year 2023

Type
BrandingGraphic Design

Overview

Santos Laguna is my dad's hometown team. Liga MX, out of Torreón, founded in 1983, five league titles, and a crest that has barely moved the whole time. That is normal for Mexican clubs. The badge is the history, so nobody touches it.

So this was never "replace the crest." It was a what-if: if this identity did decide to evolve, what would it be allowed to change? I set the limits before I drew anything. Keep the green and the gold. Keep the crown and the ball. Keep the blackletter.

the existing Santos Laguna crest beside the reworked one on a green ground, labelled old and new
Old and new. Same crown, same ball, same idea of a badge.

The one thing I pushed on was the name. Santos means saints. The club reaches for that now and then in its own campaigns, but never in the mark itself, so that was the opening: give the S a halo and let the rest of the identity hang off it.

the SL monogram in white on green, the S and L drawn as faceted blackletter blocks with a gold halo tilted over the S
The monogram.
the full lockup reading CLUB SANTOS LAGUNA in white on green, SANTOS in the faceted blackletter with the halo over its S
The full lockup, same S.

The monogram is the piece that has to work everywhere, so the crest became a container for it rather than a thing of its own. Two containments: the ball, which is the club's, and a shield, which is the one addition.

the primary crest, a crowned football drawn in green outline on gold with the SL monogram at its centre
Primary.
the secondary crest, the same crown over a plain shield in green outline on gold, the monogram inside it
Secondary.
the crest and lockup across four grounds: gold on green, black on gold, black on white, and white on near black
Four grounds, no fifth colour.

Colour and Type

Nothing here is a new colour. These are the club's own four, pushed to something more saturated, which is as far as I was willing to go: fans notice a palette change before they notice anything else, and the greens in the Comarca Lagunera are half the reason the club looks the way it does.

Palette
  • Green#339F64
  • Gold#FFC833
  • White#FFFFFF
  • Black#211F1F

The lockup is two faces. SANTOS is Fleisch (Wolf), redrawn: a blackletter with the same weight and swagger as the club's existing one, and close enough to Corona's lettering to be a joke worth making, since Corona sponsors the stadium. CLUB and LAGUNA are Novel Display Condensed Bold, which does the job the original's condensed sans was doing.

the SL monogram tiled edge to edge into a repeating pattern, white with gold halos on near black
the lockup laid over a match photograph of Santos players celebrating, the wordmark knocked out in white across the frame
Match-day treatment.

Looking at it now, next to something like 4MAT, the difference is that this one solves the mark and then stops. The halo is a good idea and the drawing holds up, but the rest of it is the mark placed onto things rather than a rule that makes them. The pattern tiles because tiling is what you do with a mark, not because the mark asked for it. That is the part I would take further today.

all work