A casino lawn, a club in Forest Hills and a park in Queens.

The US Open grew out of a national amateur championship. English Wikipedia says the U.S. National Championships began in August 1881, when men’s singles and doubles were played on grass courts at the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island, a building that now houses the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Entry that first year was limited to clubs that were members of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association. Men alone competed until 1886. Wikipedia says the first U.S. Women’s National Singles Championship was held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1887, mixed doubles followed in 1892 and women’s doubles in 1899, and for many years the different events were held at different clubs.

The tournament moved to New York in stages. Wikipedia says a group of players led by Karl Behr had worked from 1911 to bring the championships to the city, arguing that the clubs, players and fans were concentrated there, and that the association voted for the move at its annual meeting on 5 February 1915. The men’s singles were first played at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, that August, and the women’s singles followed in 1921. Apart from 1921 to 1923, when the men’s singles were held at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia, Forest Hills remained the home of the men’s event, and its stadium was completed in 1924.

The present name arrived with professional players. Wikipedia says the Open Era began in 1968, when professionals were admitted for the first time to the tournament at the West Side Tennis Club, and that the event has since been open to both amateurs and professionals. In 1975 the courts were changed from grass to clay, partly as an experiment to make the event more suited to television, and floodlights allowed matches to be played at night.

Then the tournament changed address again. In 1978 it moved about three miles north to the newly built USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens, and switched to hard courts. During the 2006 tournament the complex was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in honour of Billie Jean King. The United States Tennis Association organises the event every year in Queens, over two weeks that take in the Labor Day weekend, and it is the last of the four Grand Slam tournaments in the calendar.

A flaming ball, kept and simplified, with a blue court underneath.

The logo is built on a burning ball. It’s Nice That reported on 21 March 2018 that the USTA had asked the New York studio Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv to rework the tournament’s visual identity for the 50th anniversary of the Open Era. The previous mark, the magazine said, combined an illustration of a flaming tennis ball with thin serif type and a red swoosh, and the studio described it as “a complicated image that had challenges in digital media and did not represent the tournament well as a premium sporting and entertainment brand.” Several versions of the old mark were in circulation. Transform magazine, writing on 4 April 2018, said the previous logo had been in use for about twenty years and did not translate well to on-screen use.

The studio kept the ball. It’s Nice That said the designers felt the flaming tennis ball still carried the energy, excitement and movement associated with the event, and so they distilled it to its essence rather than replacing it. Transform said they made its lines straight and simple. The symbol was paired with italic, lowercase sans-serif lettering, chosen, Transform said, for legibility, and It’s Nice That noted that the name is held together by a flipped “u” and “n” at either end. Wikipedia now gives the tournament’s name as stylised in all lowercase.

The colours changed with it. Transform reported that the white background of the old logo was replaced with blue, that the lettering turned from navy to white, and that the ball became a more vibrant yellow. Nicole Kankam, the USTA’s managing director of marketing, was quoted by both magazines as saying the evolved symbol respected the tournament’s legacy while moving it into the future.

The courts carry a named palette of their own. Wikipedia says that since 2005 all US Open and US Open Series courts have been painted a shade of blue inside the lines, trademarked as “US Open Blue,” to make the ball easier to see for players, spectators and television viewers, while the area outside the lines is painted “US Open Green.” The surface was a cushioned hard court called Pro DecoTurf from 1978 to 2019, and the USTA announced in March 2020 that Laykold would supply the courts from that year’s tournament. The main court, Arthur Ashe Stadium, opened in 1997 and is named after the American player Arthur Ashe.

Trophies, venues and traditions.

An event that returns every year, or every few years, has to look the same and different at once. Many organisers solve this with a fixed core and a changing edition: a constant symbol sits beside a year, a number or the name of a host city, and that second element is redrawn each time. The lockup becomes a record of where the event has been, and a set of past editions laid side by side reads almost like a timeline. Some events go further and commission an artist to make an official poster or painting for each staging, so that the identity is partly authored by a different hand every time and collected long after the day itself.

Other parts of the identity are carried by people rather than printed matter. A dress code turns the crowd into a visual system, with rules on hats, jackets, colours or hemlines doing the work a style guide does for a typeface, and different areas of a venue often have different rules. Badges, ribbons and tickets that change colour from day to day add a quieter layer of coding. Even timing can act as a signature, when a ceremony or arrival happens at the same hour on every day of the event. For a designer, the lesson is that the logo is only one tool: a calendar, a uniform and a set of repeated gestures can hold an event together as firmly as any mark, and the printed identity often works well when it leaves room for them.

Keep the symbol, change everything around it.

For a designer, the US Open shows how to keep a symbol while changing almost everything around it. The flaming ball survived the 2018 redesign because, as It’s Nice That reported, its designers thought the idea still matched the event. What went was the detail: the thin serif, the red swoosh and the many variants that made the old mark hard to use on screens. Straight lines, a single yellow and a blue field produced a mark that Transform described as working in both print advertising and on-screen use, the two places the old logo had struggled.

The lowercase italic wordmark carries the same simplification into the name. Two short words set in slanted lowercase, joined by a flipped “u” and “n,” replace a thin serif that sat beside the old ball. Wikipedia now gives the name itself as stylised in all lowercase, so the treatment reaches beyond the logo into the way the event is written.

The colours run from the mark to the ground. Blue inside the lines and green outside have been the court colours since 2005, named and trademarked by the organiser, and the 2018 identity placed its own symbol on a blue field, so the logo and the playing surface now share blue as a base colour.

For a design guide, the US Open shows a long-running symbol simplified for screens and a court colour named by its organiser. Compare the Australian Open, which Transform noted had revamped its own logo in 2016 for on-screen readability, and Roland-Garros, a Grand Slam identified by its clay and its artists’ posters. For this guide we use court blue, outer green and ball yellow with an italic sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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