A school club, a new name and a change of colour.

Juventus began in Turin in late 1897 as Sport-Club Juventus, a club set up by students of the Massimo d’Azeglio Lyceum, a secondary school in the city. English Wikipedia names Eugenio and Enrico Canfari among the founders. Two years later, in 1899, the club took the name Foot-Ball Club Juventus, and in 1900 it entered the Italian Football Championship, playing its first league match on 11 March of that year.

The colours came later than the name. Wikipedia says the club’s original shirts were pink, worn with a black tie, and that the earliest were made by the father of one of the players. Repeated washing faded the colour so badly that in December 1901 the club looked for replacements. It asked one of its players, the Englishman John Savage, whether he knew anyone in England who could supply shirts in a colour that would last. Savage had a friend in Nottingham, a supporter of Notts County, who sent out black-and-white striped shirts to Turin. Wikipedia dates the stripes to the 1901–02 season in its section on colours, while its history section places the adoption around 1905. The club has worn them ever since, with white shorts and sometimes black. In 1904, the same history says, the businessman Marco Ajmone-Marsan helped steady the club’s finances, which let it move its training ground from Piazza d’Armi to the Velodrome Humbert I.

The early club was not a stable organisation. Wikipedia records that in 1906 internal disagreements over its future led its president, Alfred Dick, and several players to leave and form FBC Torino, the club that became Juventus’s city rival. Wikipedia dates the origins of the Derby della Mole, the Turin derby between the two clubs, to that split.

Ownership is part of the brand story too. Wikipedia lists the club’s owner as the Agnelli family, holding its stake through the investment company Exor. The club is based in Turin, where it plays its home matches.

An oval, a bull, a zebra and a letter.

The Juventus crest has changed shape several times, but for long stretches it was built on civic heraldry. English Wikipedia describes a version made of an oval shield with the club’s name set on a white convex band over a golden curve. Inside sits a black shield bearing the white silhouette of a charging bull, the symbol of the city of Turin, and a black mural crown, a reference to Augusta Taurinorum, the Roman name for the city. Gold in that scheme stood for honour, according to the same description.

Not every version leaned on the city arms. Wikipedia says that during the 1980s the club’s emblem was the blurred silhouette of a zebra, with the club’s name forming an arc above it. The zebra, like the nickname, came straight from the stripes, and it gave the club a mascot-style mark that worked without any reference to Turin at all.

A clean break came in January 2017. It’s Nice That, in a news story by Owen Pritchard dated 17 January 2017, reported that the club had been given a new identity by the design studio Interbrand, built around a new logotype in the shape of the letter J made from the black and white stripes of the home kit. The magazine said the identity had been launched in Milan the previous night and that the new logo would be used on the club’s kits from the following season. Wikipedia confirms that the J-shaped logo appeared on the shirts for the 2017–18 season.

The J did away with the oval, the bull and the crown. What it kept was the stripe, turned into two vertical strokes beneath the club name, so that the mark could be read as both a letter and a fragment of the shirt.

Design and documentation.

A football club’s identity works across a wide range of surfaces. The crest sits at the centre of it: a compact mark that has to read on a shirt seen from the far side of a stadium, on a television scoreboard graphic, on a phone app icon and on a stitched scarf. Clubs revise their crests from time to time, usually simplifying detail, tightening outlines or redrawing lettering so the mark reproduces cleanly at small sizes and in a single colour.

Kit colours carry the identity as much as any logo. A club’s home colours are often older than its crest, and supporters recognise them at a glance, so designers tend to treat them as fixed while the cut, trim and pattern of the shirt change from season to season. Away and third kits give more room for experiment.

Shirt sponsors add a second brand to a highly visible surface a club owns, which means the crest, the kit maker’s mark and the sponsor’s wordmark have to sit together without crowding. Stadium signage, from gate numbers to the name on the stand roof, extends the same system into architecture, wayfinding and the backdrop of every broadcast.

Stripes first, everything else second.

The Juventus identity rests on a single decision made in the club’s first decade: to swap pink and black for black-and-white stripes. Every later mark has been an argument about how much else to add to those stripes. The oval crest wrapped them in civic heraldry, with Turin’s bull and a mural crown; the 1980s zebra turned them into an animal; the 2017 J reduced them to two strokes and a word.

The kit carries the same idea. Wikipedia records Adidas as the club’s kit supplier from 2015, under a deal announced on 24 October 2013, and notes that for the 2016–17 season the club redesigned its shirt with a different take on the trademark stripes, the season before the J arrived on the chest. The stripes vary in width, spacing and trim from season to season, but the black-and-white pattern is the constant that lets a Juventus shirt be recognised before the crest is legible.

The stadium extends the system into architecture. Wikipedia says the club’s home ground, opened as Juventus Stadium on 8 September 2011 and now known as the Allianz Stadium, was designed by Hernando Suarez and Gino Zavanella, with Giorgetto Giugiaro also credited. Wikipedia lists the club as both owner and operator of the ground.

For a design guide, Juventus shows how a club can strip its crest down to the one element supporters already recognise, and rebuild a whole identity on a pattern rather than a picture. Compare it with Adidas, the club’s kit supplier since 2015, and Paris Saint-Germain, a club whose crest was also redrawn in the 2010s. For this guide we use stripe black, stripe white and crest gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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