EUROFEST IDENTITY

When Newcastle United win football’s Carling Premiership in May, their ‘Toon Army’ of fans will still be celebrating when the European Championships – cannily titled Euro 96 – arrive on Tyneside.

The June tournament will give our friends up north another excuse for celebration, and the city’s businesses have formed a consortium to build a programme of activities centred around the games.

The job of branding this festival around the football fell to a home team, Yellow M. The festival, dubbed Eurofest, aims to capture the European spirit of Euro 96 through music, dance and other distractions. The expected mix of foreign supporters, and indeed domestic fans, dictated Yellow M design something with a multi-cultural, multilingual appeal.

Designers Craig Falconer and Alan Whitfield rose to the challenge with a ticker-tape- inspired collision of vibrant colours in a torn-paper-style logo.

Debut fixtures for the identity include a city-wide poster and bus-side campaign. T-shirts and other media will follow. All are underpinned by copywriter Mike Platt’s contribution ‘Football. And then some’. Which rather neatly sums up Newcastle itself in this, its very own period of football renaissance.