MLB
Steering an American legend toward the future without abandoning its past
What we did
Industries
Major League Baseball is the nation’s longest-running professional sports league and one of the most iconic institutions in global sport—playing a defining role in shaping American culture and identity.
In recent years, Major League Baseball saw an opportunity to reignite fandom and deepen its connection with a new generation of fans. In response, the league embarked on a sweeping evolution both on and off the field, introducing new rule changes alongside a bold brand platform, ‘Baseball Is Something Else’.
As part of this transformation, MLB set out to modernize its overarching brand and refresh its design system to elevate the sport and engage a new generation of fans. We were tasked with redefining the parent brand’s architecture and design system—bringing greater focus, energy, and cohesion to the vast MLB ecosystem and helping propel the brand into its next era.
Modernizing Nostalgia
The first step in our process was research. From the outset, it was clear that while the league carries well over a century of heritage, the design system wasn’t fully leveraging that depth of history. There was a shared acknowledgment that the brand needed to evolve beyond “America’s Pastime”—building toward the future without abandoning the past. This insight led to the central idea that our work rallied around: Modernize Nostalgia.
We identified the most iconic elements of baseball’s visual heritage and set out to refresh, recontextualize, and reinterpret them for renewed relevance, greater flexibility, and stronger emotional connection. This approach became the guiding principle across every element of the design system.
The MLB silhouetted batter logo, designed by Jerry Dior in 1968 and widely considered to be an iconic and timeless mark, has remained unchanged. The MLB wordmark has been updated to align with the broader system.
Typography
The foundation of the design system is a custom suite of five typefaces that reference historical typefaces found throughout baseball’s history. This suite was developed in partnership with an all-star team of type designers.
Nick Sherman designed MLB Franklin—a redrawing of Franklin Gothic—a font synonymous with American design in the 19th century. Its use throughout baseball’s history has made it the typographic equivalent of America’s Pastime.
David Jonathan Ross designed MLB Clarendon, derived from Clarendon, released in 1845. This condensed slab-serif style also has a long lineage in baseball.
OH no Type Co. created MLB Script. There’s nothing quite as “baseball” as a baseball script. This proprietary cut serves as a symbol of baseball at large, sampling from many different script styles throughout history.
Skye Dillon developed MLB Block, an octagonal font found everywhere from historic sites such as Ebbets Field to the numerals and names found on baseball uniforms. This type style has established itself as synonymous with sports typography.
Tipotype designed MLB Flare, which calls back to the particulars of hand-lettering — a style embedded in the identities of many of the league’s teams.
Color
The color palette was developed with three broad use cases in mind. Core, Extended, and Expressive approaches were mapped against the architecture model to support both fixed and flexible approaches to color use. We developed these palettes by referencing current and past MLB logos, equipping us with a range of blues, reds, and creams. To further energize the palette, we referenced the clubs’ colors and distilled them into a set of vibrant hues to ensure broad representation of all the league’s teams.
Graphic Elements
We looked to the game itself and its ephemera to develop a set of graphic tools which could be used in a wide variety of ways. We referenced historical and in-stadium imagery, looking at everything from baseball cards to uniforms, eventually creating “shapes of the game” derived from the rounded rectangle of the MLB logo, the pentagonal home plate, base lines and scoreboard lines, a baseball’s circular form, and the field of play seen from above.
Brand Architecture
Preceding and in parallel with the design development was the architecture phase, during which we created a brand matrix tool that both organizes MLB’s current portfolio and enables seamless brand growth. Brands are plotted against two variables, proximity to gameplay and fan expectation, to determine how simple or expressive their design system should be. More utilitarian products, such as ticket apps, have more direct design systems, and cultural brands that exist to surprise and delight, such as their social media channels, have more expressive systems at their disposal.
Rollout and Implementation
Toward the end of our engagement, we partnered with internal teams to roll this work out across the league’s vast array of sub-brands, providing design support and consultation as new events and experiences were developed, including Rickwood Field and MLB Together. Over the course of our two-and-a-half-year partnership, we built a brand system for MLB that is both timeless and fresh — grounded in baseball’s history while revitalizing it for the sport's future.
All rights in this work are owned by MLB, and many applications have been designed by the MLB design team.
Tripadvisor
Refreshing a globally recognized travel icon
