28 April, 2025 As the club celebrates its record-equalling 20th title, Bulletproof's David Beare talks to Rob Alderson about history, typography, and why words unlocked the whole project. As Liverpool’s players, fans and staff celebrated winning the title in the sunshine at Anfield yesterday, Bulletproof’s David Beare had two reasons to raise a glass. Beare, a Liverpool fan, was delighted to see his club win their 20th league title. But he also led the team who recently refreshed Liverpool’s visual identity. From two new fonts to a new shade of red and a more prominent focus on the liver bird across visual assets, the new look started to roll out in February and will continue into next season. Beare, who is executive creative director at Bulletproof, explains that they first started talking with the club three years ago. The London-based studio had completed a rebrand for the Football Association of Wales, and wrote an article off the back of that project about the need for football clubs to move from being badges to becoming brands, which caught the Liverpool marketing team’s eye. Liverpool initially commissioned Bulletproof to audit its digital real estate to see how it could perform better. “I think we really helped them realise that the opportunity was a lot bigger,” Beare explains. One of Bulletproof’s biggest recommendations was the need for more consistency. Over time, the club’s assets had diverged to include, on Beare’s estimation, 30 different shades of red, 50 fonts, and 20 art direction styles. The main task, he explains, was to, “simplify what they had and amplify new assets that really told their unique story.” Bulletproof’s refreshed identity for Liverpool FC The two-and-a-half year project began with 18 months of engagement work – listening to a wide range of groups inside and outside the club, from long-serving staff to fan groups and commercial partners. That led to a new brand promise – inspiring belief – and new brand principles, graft, faith and togetherness. “Liverpool as a city, and Liverpool as a club, have always had this intrinsic sense of belief in who they are,” Beare says. “It’s a city that’s faced really difficult times. It’s had these gutting lows, but incredible highs as well. And sitting at the heart of all this was the football club, that tracked those political and socio-economic changes. “That sense of belief was really at the heart of this new promise, and it’s a sense of belief on and off the pitch,” Beare adds. The new principles were designed to feel quintessentially Liverpudlian – graft reflecting the city’s hard-work, often against the odds, and faith, captured in the players touching the famous “This is Anfield” sign on their way out of the tunnel before games. Rebranding football clubs is fraught with pressures. Perhaps most famously, Liverpool’s fierce local rivals Everton had to ditch its new crest in 2013 after a furious fan backlash. And with Liverpool’s 200 million followers across social media, there were a lot of people who would have an opinion on the new look. “I think a saving grace for us was that the club didn’t want to change the badge or the liver bird on the crest,” Beare says. “They are very wedded to those emblems, and so we weren’t being asked to introduce arbitrary new design assets that don’t feel like they belong to the club, or the city. It wasn’t about change for the sake of change.” “Our creative challenges as an agency are about solving business challenges, and it’s no different when you look at a football club.” The liver bird – which Beare describes as “so unique and so characterful” plays a central part in various visual formats, appearing on its own or in different lock-ups. He says there was “a tiny bit of refinement” to aid its digital appearance. And the symbol also informed other design decisions in more subtle ways. “The custom font LFC Serif is born out of the beautiful shapes and curves in the liver bird,” Beare explains. Bulletproof worked with Alistair McCready’s Monolith type foundry on the new typeface. “He spent four months crafting this font, and I don’t want to underestimate the time, effort and energy that went into developing it. “It feels like it’s going to stand the test of time rather than something that might have been AI generated and might last for a few months and then disappear.” That pairs with LFC Sans, a more functional typeface that compliments the serif. The combination had enough “variability and tonality” for different audiences, he says. Bulletproof’s refreshed identity and new typeface for Liverpool FC The club’s storied history also influenced the new, unified shade of red. The Bulletproof team went into the archives to recreate the classic hue associated with one of the team’s most famous players. “When you think about Kenny Dalglish wearing his red shirt, that’s the Liverpool red. It was one red back then, so it was about stripping away these new versions that don’t feel like they come from that history. In many ways, looking back has given us the answer to move forwards with.” With a lot of focus on motion, the team developed a dynamic animated format known as “the wing expression.” This again echoes the liver bird, but its forms are powered by the sounds of the fans, which were recorded at home games. “It is animated by the noise of the crowd and the atmosphere of Anfield,” Beare explains, from the roar of a goal celebration to the anticipatory silence before a penalty is taken. “We’re taking the chants, and the energy, and the sounds, and using those to power the behaviour of our typography in the wing expression,” he says. “It’s almost like code to input and affect the way in which it moves. “There are almost infinite ways that can come to life,” he adds. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/07.mp4 This new motion design bridges fan experiences in different parts of the world. So it shows up on the scoreboards around Anfield when a goal goes in, but also on digital goal alerts for international fans (Liverpool says 70% of its website traffic comes from overseas). This speaks to one of the biggest challenges, which is uniting the refreshed identity to work for matchday and overseas fans, who engage with the club in different ways, but also commercial sponsors like Google, Peloton and Adidas. “Partnerships are really important from a commercial perspective because that’s the revenue driver now,” Beare says. Bulletproof needed to make the identity more cohesive so it “could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a brand like Google,” Beare explains. The wing expression is a big part of that, because it can be dialled up and down, and even tailored to different corporate settings. Bulletproof’s new visual identity for Liverpool FC As a fan himself, Beare says it was both “a huge honour and a huge responsibility” to work on the refresh. But he says the team, which included two other Liverpool fans, didn’t struggle with objectivity. “Our creative challenges as an agency are about solving business challenges and it’s no different when you look at a football club. “So you can be quite objective in that sense, and say, this brand’s got to perform for corporate hospitality. It’s got to perform for the men’s team, the women’s team, the kids. It’s got to perform for the community. “It’s got to perform globally for fans who might be in Tokyo or in the US. So that’s no different for any other global brand we might work on in terms of how do you have something that feels cohesive, but has that flexibility to work with all those different audiences?” An additional consideration was to make sure the identity could adapt and evolve over time. Beare says they built a close relationship with the club’s design team and worked hard to make sure the new direction worked for them. “Their design team needs to be excited by the potential of the brand,” Beare explains. “One of the greatest challenges was to give them something that was really easy to work with, but with the potential to feel like there’s creative flexibility.” Now Beare can bask in the title win, which has been in the offing for weeks, and reflect on the success of the project. “There was so much consultation with so many different people,” he says. “But once we unlocked the strategy, it was actually a pretty simple creative process.” The words were hugely important, he says, to get the brand promise right. “It was something everyone could get behind, that respected their past, but felt relevant to what Liverpool is today. It comes down to semantics when you get into this stuff, but it really unlocked everything.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/10.mp4 What to read next BrandOpus creates new brand and packaging for Alpen Brand Identity 25 Feb, 2025