An athletic club, an Olympic idea and a holiday in April.

The Boston Marathon belongs to a club that is older than the race. English Wikipedia says the Boston Athletic Association, the non-profit sports body that still organises the event, was established in 1887, and that the first Boston Marathon was run on 19 April 1897, ten years later. The idea came from Athens: the race was inspired by the marathon at the 1896 Summer Olympics, where the event had been revived. Wikipedia says organisers looked at several routes before choosing a course from Metcalf’s Mill in Ashland to the Irvington Oval in Boston, and that the inaugural race was open to any competitor over 18.

The date is part of the brand. The race has traditionally been held on Patriots’ Day, a Massachusetts state holiday that commemorates the opening battles of the American Revolution. Wikipedia says that through 1968 the holiday fell on 19 April, with the race run that day unless it was a Sunday. Since 1969 the holiday has been observed on the third Monday in April, and the race is run then, a day often called “Marathon Monday” locally. Wikipedia notes that the anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride is commemorated on the same day.

The route is the other fixed point. Wikipedia says the course follows Route 135, Route 16, Route 30 and city streets from the official start in Hopkinton to the finish at Copley Square, beside the Boston Public Library, passing through eight cities and towns on the way: Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, Newton, Brookline and Boston. The Newton hills on the later miles end in Heartbreak Hill, near Boston College. Near the finish, the Boston Marathon Memorial in Copley Square was installed for the hundredth running; Wikipedia describes a circle of granite blocks around a central medallion that traces the course and shows its elevation.

For most of its history the reward was symbolic. Wikipedia says the Boston Marathon was largely a free event and that the prize for winning was a wreath woven from olive branches, a direct echo of the ancient Games that had inspired it. Corporate-sponsored prize money arrived in the 1980s. The race has been managed by DMSE Sports since 1988, Wikipedia adds, and women were officially allowed to enter from 1972.

A unicorn nobody can quite explain, turned to face the course.

The emblem is a unicorn, and it predates the marathon. Boston.com reported in April 2023 that the unicorn started as the symbol of the Boston Athletic Association and was associated with all of the club’s sports before the first marathon, and that it has since appeared on runners’ jackets, medals and trophies and at the finish line. Jack Fleming, the B.A.A.’s president and chief executive, told the site that the common belief is that the unicorn came from the family crest of one of the association’s founding members, but that this “hasn’t been proven.” He described the creature as a mythological figure that is meant to be pursued but never caught, and said that B.A.A. staff have nicknamed it “Spike.” Fleming also said the unicorn had been stylised a few times over the decades.

The most recent redraw was announced in June 2024. The Boston Globe reported on 5 June 2024 that the association had used Global Running Day to unveil a new logo for the 2025 race: a blue-and-yellow unicorn that now faces forward, to the right, as a symbol of progress, where the previous version faced left. According to the Globe, the horn points to where northeast would fall on a compass, a nod to the direction of the course from Hopkinton into Boston, and the mane has 13 spikes, one for each decade of the B.A.A.’s existence. Fleming said in a statement quoted by the paper that the emblem symbolised the organisation’s forward movement with its partners.

The blue and yellow have spread well beyond the race itself. Wikipedia says that when the Boston Red Sox introduced City Connect uniforms in 2021, the club chose a design inspired by the marathon, in yellow and blue, with Boston’s 617 area code placed on the sleeve in a way that recalls a racing bib. The team wore them on the weekend before Patriots’ Day, and on the holiday itself wore uniforms marked “Boston Strong,” the phrase adopted after the 2013 bombing. On 15 April 2013, Wikipedia says, two bombs were set off near the finish line on Boylston Street while the race was still in progress, and the race was halted.

Sponsor naming has been handled cautiously. Boston.com reported on 27 March 2023 that the B.A.A. would replace the insurer John Hancock, its principal sponsor, with Bank of America, after John Hancock decided not to renew beyond the 2023 race. Under the ten-year agreement the event became the “Boston Marathon presented by Bank of America,” and both sides said the words “Boston Marathon” would remain the most prominent part of the name, as they had been under John Hancock.

Trophies, venues and traditions.

A sporting event is an unusual kind of brand. It has no product on a shelf and often no single owner of the kind a company has; instead it is held together by a name, a date on the calendar and a set of objects and rituals that recur each time it is staged.

Trophies frequently become the mark itself. A cup, a figure or a plate is drawn, simplified and printed on tickets, broadcasts and merchandise, so that the object handed to the winner also works as the event’s signature. Host venues do similar work: a clubhouse, a finish line, a grandstand or a stretch of road is photographed so often that its outline turns into shorthand for the whole occasion.

Traditions add another layer. A jacket, a garland, a particular flower, a colour worn on the day or a song sung before the start can be as recognisable as any wordmark, and organisers tend to protect them carefully. Finally, sponsor naming sits alongside all of this. Presenting partners, official suppliers and naming rights put commercial marks next to the event’s own, and the way an organiser balances or limits them is itself a design decision worth studying.

A road, a library and a wreath.

For a designer, the Boston Marathon shows how an event can be recognised without a commissioned identity system. Its parts were assembled over more than a century: a club emblem from the 1880s, a holiday from the state calendar, a point-to-point road course and a finish beside a public library. The unicorn ties them together. Boston.com’s April 2023 report makes the point that the creature was first the badge of the athletic association as a whole, so the marathon inherited a mark rather than commissioning one, and that the creature’s heraldic origin remains a belief rather than a documented fact, according to the association’s own chief executive.

The 2024 redraw shows how such a mark can be updated without being replaced. The changes reported by The Boston Globe were small and specific: the unicorn was turned to face forward, the horn was angled towards the northeast, the mane was given a spike for each decade of the association, and the figure was set in blue and yellow. Each detail can be explained in a sentence, which makes the story easy to tell on a medal, a programme or a press release. The colours themselves had already been picked up by others, as the Red Sox City Connect kit showed in 2021.

The presenting-sponsor arrangement is a useful study in naming. Boston.com reported in March 2023 that the new agreement kept “Boston Marathon” at the front of the title, with Bank of America added as presenter. The same report noted the contrast with another race the bank sponsored, where its name stands first. For Boston, the event name, the date and the unicorn carry the identity, and the sponsor sits behind them.

For a design guide, the Boston Marathon shows a club emblem, a fixed date and a fixed road working as a brand. Compare the Olympic Games, whose 1896 revival of the marathon inspired the race, and the Tour de France, another road event with a strong colour. For this guide we use a deep blue and a warm yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Boston Marathon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.