Icelandic Athletics Federation redesign

The Icelandic Athletic Federation (FRÍ) was founded in 1947 and has been operational ever since. The federation governs Icelandic athletics as well as working towards empowering athletics in Iceland. To make the federation more visible in its mission the decision was take to update its visual identity.

Beausite Classic by Fatype and ABC Diatype Mono by Dinamo are the brand fonts of FRÍ. Beausite offers a stylistic set where cuts are made in the stems of the uppercase characters, creating a sense of movement in the type. This stylistic set is only used at the beginning of headlines and sentences to make the federations’ voice more recognizable. Diatype Mono is used as a supporting font for details.

The idea was to find a typeface that would be recognizable but at the same time not too flashy so that it would age well. To tie the font to the new logo we utilized another stylistic set that Beausite offers, where rounded dots are used instead of squared. This speaks to the rounded red dot in the logo. For the supporting font, we wanted to reference the data boards used at competitions to show the athletes’ performance data. Diatype Mono fits that purpose well. It also shares a lot of similarities with Beausite which makes them pair well. An example of that would be the lowercase a. Diatype is only used in smaller headlines, short descriptions, and supporting text.

Together with Simon Viðarsson, I wrote an in-depth article about the rebranding on Medium (also available in Icelandic), with more information, images and animations.