What has eight wheels, three world-championship titles and a reputation for empowering women and girls to harness their aggression in a positive environment? You guessed it, Portland’s beloved Rose City Rollers.
Having been around for almost 20 years fueled solely on the passion of hard-hitting ladies and grassroots effort, the Rose City Rollers partnered with Airtype when it was time for their first ever rebrand and website overhaul.
When we looked at visual trends around the sport, we saw brass knuckles, fish nets and even some barbed wire. We wanted to create something that felt new and refreshing, something that focused on derby.
The star was chosen as the primary element, representing one of the most important positions in the game: the jammer. The jammer is the only position in the game that has the ability to score points while ruthlessly pushing herself through a line of defenders.
Along with a new primary logo we created supporting marks for a complete identity system. Each one is meant to express the league in a unique way while being similar enough to tie the brand together cohesively. We added a secondary mark similar to the primary but with less information and two badges. Each badge has a derby icon and one includes a rose in the shape of a city representing Portland's most iconic nickname, Rose City.
Colors
When it came to color the Rose City Rollers told us we really only had one option and that was to keep their original purple. This was due to the fact that the other teams within the league used almost every other color in the spectrum. So what do you do when you can only use one color in a rebrand? You use multiple shades of it and create gradients.
Typefaces
Not only do Avant Garde and Karla sound like roller derby players, they also made the perfect primary and secondary type choices. We needed to choose a style to match the same ferocity and strength that the players take with them to the rink.
They needed a web overhaul to address the amount of unorganized content dispersed throughout their site, the lack of functionality and outdated design. Since the organization is run almost completely by volunteers, we needed to make the back end functional and straightforward to use.
We used insights and analytics to inform our strategy and determine which content needed to be the most accessible and easy to find. For example their live footage stream was one of their most trafficked pages in their site history yet it lived in its own separate link on their navigation bar. We changed that to be the first thing you see on their homepage and also on their schedule page when a game is happening.
We created custom post types, taxonomies and tailored each editing form to match the data model. We also styled the views to scale on all devices and integrated custom page designs.
The Rose City Rollers is one of the most successful roller derby organizations in the world and we're excited to see them represented as such. We hope to see the sport of roller derby continue to grow and are looking forward to seeing how the look and identity of the sport continues to evolve.
