Pentagram has designed a new athletic identity for FIT in New York City. FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, is an internationally recognized college known for its exceptional curriculum in art, design, communications, business, and fashion, of course, but not for its sports teams. Over the years, however, FIT has developed a first-rate athletic program. The school fields 13 intercollegiate teams in such sports as volleyball, soccer, tennis, track and field, half-marathon, cross country, swimming and table tennis, plus a dance company. FIT competes against 520 other schools in Region XV of the National Junior College Athletic Association. Five of its teams finished in the Top 10 for the country. The college also boasts two individual national champions—one in high jump and another in women's tennis. FIT athletes' prowess was also recognized when the men's swimming team and the women's track and field team were named 2012 National Academic Teams of the year.
What the FIT Tigers didn't have until now was a consistent, well-designed identity. Like a lot of schools, FIT had adopted a hodgepodge of clip-art tiger logos and generic typefaces, whatever the sports-supply vendors had in stock when the school ordered uniforms, so the look of their athletic teams was amateurish and forgettable at best.
With the assistance of Carol Leven, FIT's assistant vice president for communications, the designers assembled a rebranding committee consisting of graphic design students, student athletes and coaches who became his sounding board during the project. In the end the designers came up with an icon of a full-bodied, pouncing tiger that can be positioned over FIT's academic emblem, which was originally designed in 2001 by Pentagram. The academic logo is a simple circle with the letters FIT in all caps.
The new identity uses the same typeface as the academic identity, Bureau Grotesque, but the word "athletics" and the names of the different sports teams the college sponsors are set in all caps. The athletic identity system and the uniforms were given their own distinct palette of colors as well.
