Arsenal’s new gothic font is a modern take on black letter. It’s part of a larger multi-font branding strategy for the 140-year-old English football club.

The team unveiled its new font, Rocastle, at a pop-up exhibition this month at the Design Museum, in London. It’s named for the beloved late Arsenal player David Rocastle (1967–2001), also known as Rocky, and was created by David Rudnick, founder of the research and design studio terrain, with Léa Bruneau.

Rudnick—an Arsenal fan who says “I would only ever have worked with one club” —is also the architect behind the club’s new, bespoke font book developed over the past four years. For Rocastle, he sought an aesthetic that felt distinctly English and custom-tailored to the team.

The font has to do “a lot of very difficult contradictory things,” Rudnick tells Fast Company. “It had to be sufficiently distinctive and bold and proud as a set of letterforms that it functioned as a kind of glorious pinnacle of the identity, but it also had to be simple, legible, modern, and applicable enough to function in the way that a modern typeface would.”

The letterform is unmistakably black letter, but a mix of elements like an inline weight and swashes that recall the shape and flow of pennants in the wind, make it feel modern and English. “You create the sense of something that feels more chivalric or knightly,” Rudnick says.

Arsenal began updating its typography in 2022, and Rudnick designed three fonts licensed exclusively to the team around three pillars: team, community, and culture.

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