How Bulletproof rebuilt Liverpool FC's brand: one red, two fonts, crowd noise (interview)

By Beare's estimate the club's assets had drifted into 30 different shades of red, 50 fonts and 20 art direction styles (self-reported in the interview), while Liverpool carried some 200 million social followers (club figure) and commercial partners including Google, Peloton and adidas. Rebranding football clubs is famously fraught — rivals Everton scrapped a new crest in 2013 after fan fury — so the club ruled out any change to the badge or the liver bird.

Simplify and amplify: collapse 30 shades of red and 50 fonts into one archive-true red and two custom typefaces, with motion type driven by Anfield crowd noise

The two-and-a-half-year project opened with 18 months of engagement — staff, fan groups, commercial partners — yielding the brand promise 'inspiring belief' and three principles: graft, faith and togetherness. Bulletproof kept the badge and liver bird untouched, pulled the red back to the Dalglish-era hue found in the club archives, and paired LFC Serif — its curves drawn from the liver bird, crafted over four months with Monolith's Alistair McCready — with a functional LFC Sans. The 'wing expression', a dynamic typographic format echoing the liver bird, is animated by crowd noise recorded at home games and appears on Anfield scoreboards and in global goal alerts. The identity started rolling out in February 2025.

The refresh was still rolling out into the following season when Design Week published the interview on 28 April 2025, as Liverpool celebrated a record-equalling 20th league title; no third-party business results were reported. Its stated test was cohesion at scale: an identity that could 'stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a brand like Google' while serving matchday fans, a fanbase where (per the club) 70% of website traffic is overseas (self-reported in the interview), sponsors, and the women's and community teams.

In a Design Week interview published 28 April 2025, Bulletproof executive creative director David Beare — a Liverpool fan — walks through the studio's refresh of Liverpool FC's visual identity, which began rolling out in February 2025 and was designed to continue into the next season. Beare says the club first approached Bulletproof after its rebrand for the Football Association of Wales and an accompanying article arguing football clubs must move 'from badges to brands'; the first commission was an audit of the club's digital real estate, which convinced the club the opportunity was bigger.

The strategy Beare describes is 'simplify what they had and amplify new assets that really told their unique story'. They went to the archives for the single red of the Kenny Dalglish era instead of inventing a hue, kept the liver bird — 'a tiny bit of refinement' for screens only — and built LFC Serif from its curves alongside LFC Sans, giving the system 'variability and tonality' for matchday fans, overseas supporters, kids and corporate hospitality alike. The words came first: the promise 'inspiring belief' and the principles graft, faith and togetherness, he says, 'unlocked everything'.

The most distinctive move is the 'wing expression', a motion format whose behaviour is driven by recordings of the Anfield crowd — the roar of a goal, the silence before a penalty — so the identity itself carries the one thing no other club can copy. Beare says it shows up on the stadium scoreboards when a goal goes in and in digital goal alerts for international fans, bridging the club's local ritual and its global audience.

It modernises a 130-year-old fan-owned symbol system by leaving the sacred parts untouched — no crest change, no liver bird redesign — after Everton's 2013 crest backlash showed the downside.

The archive method is transferable: looking backwards (Dalglish's one red) gave the answer for moving forward, replacing invented brand colours with a historically true one.

Crowd noise as a design input turns the stadium's atmosphere — the club's least copyable asset — into the behaviour of the typography itself.

The 18-month listening phase before any design shows how consent is built for a rebrand whose audience is 200 million strong and opinionated.

When a beloved brand must change, leave its sacred symbols alone and rebuild everything around them — and let the asset no rival can copy (the crowd's own noise) drive the system.

The identity continued rolling out through the 2025–26 season, with Bulletproof working closely with the club's in-house design team so the system stays usable and flexible for years — Beare calls giving the internal team 'creative flexibility' one of the hardest parts. The interview ran the day after Liverpool clinched a record-equalling 20th league title, with Beare calling the project both 'a huge honour and a huge responsibility'.