Sporting CP

Working with brand agency, JKR, we helped to turn a distinctive piece of Sporting CP lettering into a fully functioning brand typeface, giving the club a voice born from its strong heritage.

Founded in Lisbon, Sporting Clube de Portugal is one of Europe’s great football institutions. A club with a fiercely protected heritage, a globally recognised green and white identity, and a remarkable history of developing players who go on to define the game.

From Cristiano Ronaldo to Luís Figo, Sporting’s reputation has always been about more than performance on the pitch. At the heart of the club is its ‘Code’: the belief in developing the person before the athlete. A philosophy that’s been passed down for generations.

As part of its first major identity refresh in 25 years, Sporting CP worked with JKR to create a brand system rooted in the club’s past but built for its future.

We were briefed by JKR to develop Sporting Sans, a bespoke typeface inspired by the crown and built from a piece of lettering originally used for the club’s internal newspaper.

The lettering had character and a strong connection to the wider identity, but it had only been designed for a single wordmark rather than as a functioning type system. Our role was to translate its spirit into a complete typeface: something robust, flexible and ownable, while keeping the distinctive features.

Turning a piece of lettering into a typeface is a bit like turning a talented academy player into a first-team star. The potential was there, but it needed structure and discipline.

The original forms carried the sharpness and confidence of the crown, but they had been designed for a single wordmark rather than a full alphabet. We refined the proportions, balanced the rhythm and introduced consistency across letters, weights and use cases.

Thin stems were strengthened to give the typeface more presence, while softer curves were added to rounded characters such as O, C and G, helping Sporting Sans feel more natural and usable as a brand voice.

The result is a direct, confident typeface rooted in the club’s visual language, but built to work across headlines, digital applications and wider communications.