On 1st January 2022, the GTFC Board launched a new club website and advised fans of the Club’s first ever brand guidelines. 50 years after the introduction of the current club crest the Board also advised fans that it had teamed up with lifelong Mariners fan and designer at global giant Apple, Rich Lyons to refine and digitise the club crest.
The Board saw the changes to the crest as brilliant, but subtle; preserving the legacy of the crest but also improving it to work better in a digital age. The new crest is rebuilt entirely from the ground up, using the basic ingredients of the existing version – the sash, the shield, the stripes, the trawler, the fish and the club name. It is constructed wholly upon a grid of geometric shapes that are compositionally harmonious in their relation to each other, and the scale of components have been optimised to allow the crest to be used at any scale digitally and physically. Adding the 1878 flag to the trawler was a loving tribute to the long legacy of the club, and a graphic device that sits nicely with the other elements.
The Board promised to seek feedback from supporters on the website over the coming weeks, but we were so convinced about the subtlety of the changes to the crest we failed to consult. We got it wrong. Despite significant effort to ensure that we communicated the change well, our social media posts were also delayed by several hours, thus making it appear at first as if the Board was being less than transparent on the changes.
The Board wholeheartedly supports the proposed changes, and the work of Rich on the crest and sees it very much a part of the incremental improvements we have promised; but we also want to put things right when we make mistakes. Our fans will, therefore have the opportunity to vote on the two versions of the club crest in the next few days, and we will communicate the results.
We encourage all our fans to read the whole article originally published about the proposed changes.
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GTFC Board
