Franz Reisch, the Kitzbüheler Horn and a ski club, 1893–1913.

Kitzbühel is a medieval town in Tyrol, in the Kitzbühel Alps between the Hahnenkamm and the Kitzbüheler Horn, about 100 kilometres east of Innsbruck. English Wikipedia says its trade and industry grew after the Salzburg-Tyrol Railway was completed in 1875. Skiing arrived with a newcomer: German Wikipedia says Franz Reisch, a merchant from Kufstein, came to Kitzbühel in November 1890 and from 1891 ran the family’s gingerbread and candle-making business there, with a pastry shop and café attached.

His skis came from a book. German Wikipedia says that in 1892, inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s account of crossing Greenland on skis, Reisch bought a pair of Norwegian skis 2.30 metres long. After practising alone from January 1893 on a slope at the foot of the Hahnenkamm, he climbed the Kitzbüheler Horn on skis on 15 March 1893 and wrote up the ascent in the Munich journal Der Schneeschuh that November. German Wikipedia dates small local races to the winter of 1895, after a larger shipment of skis arrived from Norway; English Wikipedia says the town hosted a ski race in 1894.

Reisch then built the institutions around the sport. German Wikipedia says he founded the Wintersportvereinigung Kitzbühel at a meeting on 21 December 1902, where members agreed to have thirty pairs of skis made and given free to local boys, whom Reisch taught himself that winter. On his initiative the town hosted the Tyrolean ski championships in 1905 and the Austrian ski championships in 1907, and in 1908 the Ski Club of Great Britain held its championships there.

He was also the town’s promoter in office. German Wikipedia says Reisch sat on the municipal council from 1892 and was mayor from 1903 to 1913, and that he also introduced curling, ice hockey and a bobsleigh run to the town.

A cable car, a downhill on the Streif and a red ski school.

The mountain business behind the resort dates from 1928. German Wikipedia says the Bergbahn AG Kitzbühel was founded with the building of the Hahnenkammbahn, the cable car up the town’s mountain, which opened quietly on 5 or 6 March 1928 after construction problems delayed it by a season. The painter Alfons Walde, a Kitzbühel native, planned both station buildings in 1927, according to his German Wikipedia entry, and they still stand despite two rebuilds of the lift.

The company grew outward from there. German Wikipedia says a ski circuit, a connected loop that could be skied without repeating a lift, opened in 1948; a lift to the Kitzbüheler Horn followed in 1951, and skiing reached Kirchberg, Jochberg and Pass Thurn in 1959. In 1969 the Bergbahn AG merged with the Berg- und Skilift GmbH and the Kirchberger Bergbahnen AG. The company now trades under the name KitzSki, and its lifts run from the Kitzbühel Alps over Kirchberg and the Horn to St. Johann in Tirol.

The races followed three years after the cable car. German Wikipedia says the Hahnenkamm-Rennen has been held on the mountain since 1931 and has been part of the World Cup since the circuit began in 1967. The downhill and super-G run on the Streif, which English Wikipedia says was introduced in 1937, and the slalom on the Ganslernhang. Women’s races were part of the meeting from 1932 to 1961, after which they moved to Bad Gastein.

Walde’s hand is also on the ski school’s colour. His German Wikipedia entry says that in 1950 he designed posters for the ski school and the red caps and pullovers of its instructors, who were afterwards known as the Rote Teufel, the red devils. Between 1920 and 1938, it says, his posters of winter landscapes and winter sport made him known well beyond Tyrol and shaped the image of the province as a place to ski.

A chamois, a red and a lettering from 1933.

A ski resort sells a place before it sells a service, so its identity tends to start with the mountain itself. Many resort marks reduce a ridgeline or a peak to a few strokes, a silhouette that reads at the size of a lift-pass chip and on the side of a gondola cabin. The risk is that one outline of jagged triangles looks much like another, which is why the stronger marks borrow something specific: the profile of one summit, a local animal, a letterform cut like a slope. Trail maps carry the rest of the visual language. They are painted or drawn views rather than true maps, bending the terrain so every run can be seen at once, and the hand of the illustrator often becomes as recognisable as the logo. Lift tickets and season passes add a third surface, small, handled every day and redesigned each winter.

The palette often arrives ready-made. Runs are graded with colour codes and symbols for difficulty, and a set of greens, blues, reds and blacks on white snow gives designers a scheme that skiers already know how to read. Older resorts also draw on the travel posters once commissioned by railways and tourist offices, with flat colour, bold sans or script lettering and a skier caught mid-turn. Identity work is complicated by who owns what. The lift company, the village or town and a holding group may each keep separate marks, and a visitor can meet all three in a single day, on a ticket, a street sign and a pass card.

Walde’s chamois, a licence system and a new look in 2024.

The town’s mark dates from the interwar years. Alfons Walde’s German Wikipedia entry says that in 1933 he designed the Gams, the chamois, together with the lettering, and that both are still used as the protected word-and-figurative mark “Kitzbühel”. Kitzbühel Tourismus told the same story on its brand pages, archived in January 2018: it credited Walde with the Kitzbühel lettering of 1933 and named the chamois, the red colour, the architecture of the old town and Walde’s lettering as the style elements that make the brand recognisable. It said it had worked on the brand since 2008 with the brand strategy consultancy Brand:Trust, that anyone using the lettering or the chamois needed a licence, commercial or non-commercial, and that neither could be altered in form or colour. The red logo file the tourism office served in 2021 was filled with #E1001A.

That signet changed in 2024. Leadersnet reported that Kitzbühel Tourismus presented a complete rebranding on 20 June 2024, including a new logo, after more than fifty years in which the signet with the chamois had not changed. The new corporate design was created mainly by the Zurich agency Brandpulse, and those responsible described it as “mutig, frech und international”, bold, cheeky and international; Leadersnet wrote that it was somewhat reminiscent of a fashion label. The report said the identity moved away from images of natural beauty towards a stylised, artificial look, replaced classic slogans with the message “Your Time is NOW”, and included a geometric grotesque typeface.

The launch itself was staged as a campaign. Leadersnet said teasers reading “Something NEW is Coming” ran for weeks in the town and on social media, that the town was rebranded overnight in a guerrilla action, and that at the evening event, under the motto “From Tradition to Transition”, invited members each brought a puzzle piece that together formed the new logo. Managing director Viktoria Veider-Walser said the chamois had been and remained the central element of the brand, and that surveys on brand perception had shown the need to make it fit for the future.

For a design guide, Kitzbühel shows how a destination can hold one emblem from 1933 into the 2020s — a chamois drawn by a local painter who also designed its cable-car stations — and then redraw everything around it while keeping the animal at the centre. Compare St. Moritz, another alpine resort town that markets itself by its name, and Courchevel, a resort that renamed its villages to sell one name. For this guide we use Gams red, slate and powder with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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