A Hamilton newspaperman’s idea, renamed three times.

The Commonwealth Games date from 1930, when they were held as the British Empire Games in Hamilton, Ontario. English Wikipedia says the event ran from 16 to 23 August 1930 and was opened by Lord Willingdon, with the ceremonies and athletics at Civic Stadium. The idea of a sporting meeting for the members of the Empire had been floated as early as 1891 by John Astley Cooper, but Wikipedia credits the Hamilton edition to Melville Marks Robinson, a journalist at The Hamilton Spectator, who proposed and lobbied for it after talks around the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.

The event’s name has tracked the history of the Commonwealth itself. Wikipedia says it was the British Empire Games until 1950, the British Empire and Commonwealth Games from 1954 to 1966 after a name change that took effect in 1952, and the British Commonwealth Games for the Edinburgh edition of 1970 and the next in 1974. Since the 1978 edition in Edmonton it has been officially the Commonwealth Games. Wikipedia says they are also referred to as the “Friendly Games”.

The Games are run by the Commonwealth Games Federation, which Wikipedia describes as the organisation responsible for the direction and control of the Games and the Commonwealth Youth Games, with headquarters at Commonwealth House in London. The federation decides the sporting programme and awards hosting rights. In recent years it has also adopted a public name: the Indian news agency IANS, reporting from London on 10 March 2025, said the federation had changed its name to Commonwealth Sport on Commonwealth Day, under a brand campaign called “More in Common”.

The governing body explained the change in a statement quoted by IANS: “Commonwealth Day also marks the date we transition from a Sports Federation to a Sport Movement, Commonwealth Sport becoming our public name.” Its chief executive, Katie Sadleir, said the evolution would help the organisation communicate its role in staging the Games and in supporting sport across its member nations and territories between editions.

A celebration mark, three Vs and six points.

The visual identity came before the name. Around the Rings, the Olympic news service, reported that the federation’s new Commonwealth Sport brand and logo were formally showcased for the first time to delegates at the CGF General Assembly in Rwanda, an event the specialist site Host City dated to September 2019. The report said the brand was developed in consultation with the Commonwealth Games Associations, was created by the UK agency RBL, and replaced a more internally focused corporate identity launched in 2000. Then chief executive David Grevemberg said the federation was “not just unveiling a new logo and emblem but actually linking our narrative, positioning and meaning.”

The logo’s meaning was set out in 2025. Sadleir told IANS that the Commonwealth Sport logo with its celebration mark had been in use for some time, and that its three coloured V shapes represent the movement’s three values, Humanity, Equality and Destiny, rising to six points that stand for the six regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and Oceania.

RBL, on its own case-study page, says it gave the brand the essence “Sport is only the beginning” and changed the brand name from the Commonwealth Games Federation to Commonwealth Sport to mark a shift from running a series of quadrennial events to a movement working between them. The agency says the identity echoes “the instinctive action of athletes as they celebrate their success.”

The bigger change concerns the event emblems. RBL says that until Birmingham 2022 each Games used a bespoke emblem, and that soon after the Birmingham closing ceremony it helped the movement develop a model in which the celebration device is kept from Games to Games and modified each time to become the event emblem. IANS reported in 2025 that Glasgow 2026 is the first edition of the Games to incorporate the logo into its event mark.

Design and documentation.

A multi-sport event or federation identity has to hold together a programme of very different competitions under one sign. The mark may appear on a start banner, a finish arch, a bib number, a medal ribbon, a television graphic and a souvenir cap, often in the same week and in different host cities. That pushes designers toward a compact symbol that can be stamped in one colour, and a wordmark that stays legible when it is shrunk onto a lanyard or stretched across a gantry.

Single letters and short monograms are a common answer. A letter can be cut from tape, stencilled onto a ramp or embroidered on a sleeve, and it reads at speed. Finish-line imagery is another resource: the arch, the tape and the clock give an event a stage that photographers return to every year, and the identity is often designed to sit on that stage.

Federations carry a second layer. A governing body may hold the rights to a competition name while host cities create their own edition emblems, so the parent mark has to sit comfortably beside a changing local design. Organisers often keep the core symbol stable and let colour, city name and year do the changing.

From a new emblem every time to one mark, adapted.

The Commonwealth Games identity has two layers: a parent mark owned by the federation and an emblem for each host city. RBL says that until Birmingham 2022 every Games used a bespoke emblem. The Commonwealth Sport system reverses that. According to RBL, the celebration device now stays constant and is adapted for each Games, and IANS reported that Glasgow 2026 is the first edition to carry it in its event mark.

The other durable element is a ritual rather than a logo. Wikipedia says the Queen’s Baton Relay was introduced at the 1958 Games in Cardiff and is now the King’s Baton Relay, carrying a message from the Head of the Commonwealth from Buckingham Palace to the opening ceremony. IANS reported that the relay for Glasgow 2026 was launched at the palace on Commonwealth Day 2025, with King Charles placing a sealed message in the baton and the cyclist Sir Chris Hoy as the first bearer.

The names tell the rest of the story. Four official titles between 1930 and 1978, then a public name for the governing body in 2025, show an organisation that has repeatedly redrawn its identity to match its membership, while keeping the event itself recognisable through ceremonies, a flag and the relay.

For a design guide, the Commonwealth Games show how a federation can move from bespoke host-city emblems to a single adaptable mark, and how a values statement can be built into the geometry of a logo. Compare it with the Olympic Games, whose rings play the same parent-mark role, and the Paralympic Games, another multi-sport event under a federation identity. For this guide we use games violet, ember and track white with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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