NFL All-Pro Stats
The NFL Design team, in collaboration with Neil Summerour of Positype, have just completed an extended family of typefaces specifically designed to improved the aesthetic and accessibility on screens of all sizes. This work took design elements from the NFL’s Shield logo, classic typographic principles, and advances in font rendering technologies to create a contemporary family of typefaces that complement and extend the existing NFL brand. The All-Pro family will begin rolling out on NFL digital properties and content over the off-season, and will be widely adopted for the NFL’s 100th season beginning this fall.
Why create a new type family?
Problems had begun to emerge in the early 2010’s when embedded fonts became standard on the web. The NFL’s existing family of typefaces, Endzone, was designed for corporate branding and consumer products, not digital screens. Endzone proved to be functional in some cases, but the product designers were too often forced to license other typefaces for digital products. These decisions came with operational, branding, and budget implications that became increasingly challenging to manage. Things really became untenable as the diversity of digital screens and products exploded during the middle of the decade. The NFL needed something new.
Defining All-Pro
It was important to begin with the recognition that this was NOT part of a rebranding of the National Football League. One of the strongest and most recognizable brands in the world, the NFL is iconic and what was to be created had to live next to and compliment the Shield, the existing type families, a number of event and initiative marks, and the 32 team brands. Most importantly, the output needed to solve the issues of accessibility, legibility, consistency, and file weight that were the impetus for the project.
The All-Pro family delivers on all of those goals. It is a consistent and focused system that remains horizontally efficient and vertically compact without compromising warmth. The typefaces avoid cliché trappings of letterform clipping and truncation, trendy visual motifs, and naive letter construction that ultimately age all too quickly and fall out of fashion. Instead, All-Pro relies on well-drawn, crisp letterforms and thoughtful aesthetic choices that strike a perfect balance between familiarity, fashion, and function.
All-Pro Stats
This type family addresses a very specific challenge that is essential for all sports experiences: the presentation of data-rich interfaces like statistics and scores. Summerour and the NFL Design team refined All-Pro Sans to create a type family ideal for that purpose. All-Pro Stats features a slightly wider footprint, open apertures to avoid mottling and bleeding of letterforms that could create legibility issues, and with slightly smaller and wider caps. These decisions were intentional and focused on even contrast and legibility.
As with All-Pro Sans, the numerals are designed as tabular sets (essentially monospaced), allowing conformity in stacked and repetitive entries of statistics and other data.
Delivered in: 4 weights and matching italics
