Frankel Identity Changes Conversation

Common Enemy Sneakers Support Public Health

Dave Frankel, the ex-Pentagram and COLLINS designer, has developed a brand identity for basketball sneaker company Common Enemy. Led by founder and PUMA alum Ryan Gordon, Common Enemy is officially hitting the ground running to change the conversation around public health in the U.S. by donating 5% of every purchase to nonprofits fighting to improve our public health system.

 

 

When it came to bringing this vision to life, Gordon says that he called on his old friend and dormmate to create a striking visual identity that reflected an elite-level performance basketball shoe company designed to make an impact.

 

 

Key design identity details developed by Frankel include: the complete design system is anchored in its blunt and urgent approach to typography and color; for the display typeface, a condensed sans-serif GT America was chosen as a modern take on 19th century American Gothics and 20th century European Neo-Grotesk typefaces; for the color palette, the brand-red orange is kinetic, loud, and urgent, and the many secondary gradients are meant to provide aesthetic depth and uniqueness, to reference the diversities of the game of basketball; abstract linework rooted in the lines of basketball courts can be found within the photographic elements, on the shoe box and bag packaging; the liner treatment above and below the brand name in the logotype are also a reference to the inbound lines of a basketball court; and for the logo, Frankel and Gordon chose an abstracted ā€œCā€ and ā€œEā€ to express movement.

 

 

The founder of Virgo design firm in New York City, Frankel has spent the last three years teaching graphic and interactive design and typography at the School of Visual Arts, has been a guest critic at Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute, and has written about design for Print Magazine.