Sultans of Swing

BRAND STRATEGY | IDENTITY SYSTEM DESIGN | COPYWRITING

Challenge

Create a logo and brand identity system for a group of golfing buddies who proudly put the "am" in Pro-am.

Scope

Brand strategy
Identity system design
Merchandise design
Social content creation

Results

The Sultans are completely besotted with their new look, and are the envy of the Cape golfing community.

Context

The amateur golfing fraternity is typified by its camaraderie, and is steeped in almost as many traditions as the professional one.

Perhaps the most treasured of these is the golfing tour – a group of friends who play together regularly under adopted team names, often organising trips to courses around their country for some old-fashioned male bonding.

Opportunity

Clint Scott approached me with the brief to develop a brand for his amateur golfing buddies' tour, and I jumped at the opportunity. I love the game, and have hacked up many a pristine fairway in my time. Developing a fun, vibrant golfing brand has always been on my checklist of dream projects.

The challenge here was that the team's name isn't exactly unique – thousands of amateur golfers around the world have dubbed their teams the "Sultans of Swing", so I had to come up with a special brand mark to make Clint's team stand out from the masses.

Goal

We needed the mark to be unique, memorable, humorous and suitable for application to multiple touchpoints – from embroidery on shirts and caps, to print on t-shirts, to social media profile images.

Solution

I combined a set of golf clubs and pin flags to form the Sultan's face and beard, proudly gazing at us from beneath a turban adorned with a ball perched on a tee, in place of the traditional feathers.

Identity system

I then paired the Sultan icon with a smart serif typeface for the name, and a bold sans-serif for the subtext, creating a mark oozing as much class as it does cleverness. Alternate lockups and a bespoke script version were also created, along with a colour palette drawn from Arabic royal themes, and a brand pattern inspired by Arabic architecture.

Online presence

For social media marketing, I came up with a campaign utilising terminology often used by golfers taking the mickey out of each other while playing a round. I injected some visual humour into the campaign by manipulating stock photographs in Photoshop to create a library of images depicting shanked drives, missed putts and hit bunkers.

Merchandise & branding

The unique golfing Sultan icon and its accompanying brand assets and pattern made developing a range of merchandise an easy job, as they were applied to caps, golf shirts, tracksuit tops, and even pullovers.

I also designed a range of t-shirts incorporating additional brand marks inspired by golfing slang, to be worn by the unfortunate victims at post-round fines meetings.