The Common Projects logo: A sneaker brand symbol of luxury and simplicity
If you’re a self-defined sneakerhead or lover of modern fashion, then you might be familiar with the Common Projects logo. But, how much do you really know about Common Projects logo history?
The “Common Projects” company sets itself apart from other sneaker and fashion brands, with an interesting approach to marketing, product creation, and visual identity. The organization rarely draws much attention to its official brand mark, or color palette.
Instead, it positions itself as an innovator in the apparel landscape, focusing on luxury, and the use of unique serial numbers, printed on every shoe. If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of Common Projects’ visual identity, or how it became such a powerful fashion brand, you’re in the right place.
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the identity of the Common Projects company, and how it has transformed over the years.
Introducing the Common Projects brand
Before we begin our discussion of Common Projects logo history, it’s worth taking a moment to introduce the company itself. Common Projects is an American luxury footwear company, specializing in the creation of unique leather sneakers and running shoes.
Initially, the organization was founded by two entrepreneurs in 2004, Flavio Girolami and Prathan Poopat. Poopat entered the company as an American-based art directory, while Girolami shared his insights as an Italian creative consultant.
The idea for the business emerged when Poopat and Girolami were working together on a number of “Common Projects”, hence the name.
One of these projects was the original shoe produced by the company, the “Achilles”. Interestingly, the founders and their team worked together on apparel designs while still living in different countries. However, most of the materials for the shoes were sourced directly from Italy.
More than anything else, what separates Common Projects from other sneaker brands, is how they identify their shoes. Every shoe features a line of numbers printed along the heel. These numbers represent the style, size, and color of the garment.
In the early years, the brand designed these numbers so they could be rubbed off by customers. However, today, each number is depicted in gold foil, acting as a status symbol for the brand.
Common Projects logo history: The evolving emblem
Compared to other sneaker brands, Common Projects has taken quite a unique approach to branding. Rather than using a particularly unique logo on their footwear, website, and marketing materials, the organization relies on the quality of their products to help identify them.
Common Projects shoes don’t feature any logos at all, for the most part. Instead, they’re defined by the golden number printed just above the heel. This has turned the dynamic range of numbers on Common Project shoes into a type of logo in its own right.
However, that doesn’t mean the company lacks an official logo. In fact, since it launched in 2004, Common Projects has been associated with two very different brand emblems.
The first logo is far more unique than the alternative, featuring a stylized wordmark, displaying the word “common” in an artistic, handwritten font. Each character in the letter has been humanized, creating an image that looks a little like a crowd of people.
Although this image has appeared on its own in some marketing and branding materials, often depicted in black on a white background, it occasionally includes a secondary wordmark.
The wordmark, traditionally written in a bright green, sans-serif font, appears in all uppercase letters, with significant spacing between each character. According to the company, the design team worked with the Lawless agency to create this visual identity.
The unique design was intended to convey the unique nature of the company, its commitment to collaboration, and its focus on community representation.
Alongside this logo, Common Projects also created a separate wordmark, the one most commonly connected with the business today. This version of the Common Projects emblem appears on the company’s website, as well as various marketing materials.
Far simpler than the other design, the straightforward Common Projects logo features a simple inscription, depicted in sans-serif font, similar to the subline of the alternative emblem.
The letters are all evenly spaced and balanced, and are typically depicted in black on a white background. The simplicity of the design highlights the company’s transparent and authentic personality, as well as their approach to the footwear market.
This logo makes it clear that Common Projects wants to create shoes that speak for themselves, without relying on any specific decorative elements or marketing campaigns.
The Common Projects logo: Fonts and colors
Whether you’re familiar with the decorative Common Projects logo, featuring numerous human-style shapes, or you’re a fan of the simplistic wordmark, the company clearly has an interesting view of branding.
Where other sneaker and fashion companies use their logos as status symbols, designed to capture and engage their customers, this business takes a different approach. Common Projects doesn’t rely on its logo alone to convey the personality of its company or founders to its customers.
Instead, the company invests heavily in the quality of its products, and sets them apart from competitors in the marketplace with unique design elements, like the golden number printed on the heel.
If you want to see the Common Projects logo in closer detail, check out these resources:
What color is the Common Projects logo?
Since its inception, Common Projects has taken a relatively simplistic approach to branding. Although one variation of its logo is certainly more decorative than the other, the company has stuck to straightforward and subtle choices in terms of shade.
The official Common Projects logo colors today are black and white. These are the shades used in the standard wordmark, apparent on the Common Projects website and product packaging. However, the alternative Common Projects logo color palette occasionally includes a bright green hue.
The colors chosen by the company are meaningful. Black and white, popular in the fashion industry, are often used to showcase ideas of power, sophistication, and elegance. Green, on the other hand, is a color frequently associated with growth and wealth.
What font does the Common Projects logo use?
There are a few different typefaces fans of the Common Projects brand may be familiar with today. The decorative Common Projects logo, which features the stylized handwritten word “Common” shaped to look like a group of people, includes two fonts.
The first is the typeface used for the “Common” symbol, which is unique to the brand, and consists of numerous curved lines and circles. The second is the sans-serif uppercase typeface, used for the secondary strapline beneath the logo.
The official Common Projects logo font, used for the wordmark on the company’s website, only features a single typeface. It’s a simple and straightforward sans-serif font, all in uppercase. It’s similar in style to commercial fonts like Roboto, Arial, or Tahoma.
Learning from the Common Projects symbol
Looking at Common Projects logo history is interesting for a number of reasons. Not only has the company experimented with two very different designs for its brand emblem, but it has also shown a unique approach to branding in general.
Rather than printing its logo on its products, or using marketing campaigns to make its visual identity stand out, Common Projects focuses heavily on drawing attention to its shoes. Each Common Projects shoe isn’t defined by a logo, but instead by a unique serial number, depicted in golden foil.
This gives the company a modern, dynamic, and innovative appearance, which helps to set it apart from other fashion companies in the footwear space.
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