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Brand Identity / Graphic Design — 2010 · Exceed League Organisation

ELO Identity

Reversed lockup on a black plate: the ELO wordmark and Exceed League Organisation in white, the leading pixel cluster picking up grey tones so the mark still reads against the dark ground.

A full graphic and brand identity for the Exceed League Organisation, delivered by RDVS. Design in 2010: logotype and concept plates, a colour and type system, business card, letterhead and a desktop wallpaper.

Exceed League Organisation needed a complete identity rather than a single logo, and RDVS. Design presented the work as a branded deck. It opens with two cover plates, one grey and one red, that introduce a pixel-grid motif of dissolving squares; that pattern becomes the connective tissue running through the logotype, the stationery and the desktop wallpaper.

The wordmark sets ELO in a wide, slabbed italic built from the same blocky geometry, fronted by a cluster of squares that reads as motion or a starting grid. A concept plate reduces the idea to ELO plus a cross and three arrows before the lockups appear, and separate plates show the reduced logotype, a single-colour black version and a reversed white mark on black.

Red does the heavy lifting: a saturated gradient with the pixel pattern fading through it, used on the covers, the reverse of the business card and the desktop wallpaper. Engel light and Engel bold form the type system, specified on its own plate with alphabets and numerals. Later plates widen the palette with blue, green and grey card variants, and the card carries an Accra postal address.

The deliverable is a standard corporate kit: primary and secondary lockups, a colour variant sheet, business card, letterhead with a red top band, and a laptop mockup that puts the wallpaper in context. Every plate is captioned in the same corner style, so the eleven deck plates read as one guideline spread rather than as loose artwork handed over in pieces.

The commission predates the gallery’s online date by five years. The deck’s own title plate reads “Branding designed for Exceed League Organisation by Revival design+vfx studios / Submitted: 19th november 2010 / Presentation best viewed in 75% preview”, and the studio had already posted logotype work for this client on its blog on 26 October 2010, three weeks earlier. The 2015 this listing used to carry is the year the set was uploaded to Behance, not the year the identity was designed.

Those two blog sheets show the logotype in orange and gold rather than the deck’s red, and they set out two directions: the pixel-cluster ELO that was carried forward, and a swirling lower-case e built from curved blades, which was not. Both use the same large-mark, reduced-version and one-colour panel layout the finished deck keeps, and both carry the studio’s own typo in the caption, “one colour vesion”, which the deck corrects. The rejected swirl emblem is plated here as the twelfth image, because the blog is the only place it survives. The orange pixel sheet is not, because the deck’s red plate is the same composition at 1400 pixels wide instead of 800 and with the caption fixed.

The project was published as ELO — IDENTITY — RDVS. DESIGN; the full set is on Behance, and the two October 2010 logotype sheets are EXCEED LEAGUE ORGANISATION | GRAPHIC DESIGN , IDENTITY on the studio’s blog.

Grey gradient cover plate with a diagonal grid of dissolving squares at the top right; small lettering at the lower left reads Exceed League Organisation (brand presentation) above several lines of fine print.
The same cover composition rendered in saturated red, the pixel grid fading into the gradient from the right, with Exceed League Organisation in white at the lower left and a small caption line beside it.
White concept plate: the letters ELO in a thin red outline, a red plus sign and three red arrows pointing right, with the word concept printed small in red at the bottom right corner.
Primary lockup on white: the blocky red ELO logotype with a pixel cluster leading into the first letter, and Exceed League Organisation set beneath it in red, Exceed heavier than the rest.
Logotype variation sheet, captioned logotype variation in red: two stacked panels show a smaller red lockup labelled reduced version and a black lockup labelled one colour version on a white ground.
Reversed lockup on a black plate: the ELO wordmark and Exceed League Organisation in white, the leading pixel cluster picking up grey tones so the mark still reads against the dark ground.
Corporate typeface plate, captioned corporate typeface: AaBbCc01234 in large red letterforms, with Engel light and Engel bold specified below, each showing a full alphabet in upper and lower case plus numerals.
Call card plate: the red gradient back with a white ELO mark, and the white front carrying a name, the title patron, a plus two three three phone number, an email and a P.O. Box address in Osu, Accra.
Colour variation sheet, captioned colour variation: four card backs in red, blue, green and grey gradients, each with the white ELO mark and the pixel grid drifting across one corner.
Letterhead plate, captioned letterhead: two A4 sheets marked back and front, the pixel grid dissolving across the foot of each page, with a red ELO band and thin rule across the top of the front sheet.
Wallpaper plate, captioned wallpaper: an open laptop shown on a white ground, its screen filled with the red gradient brand wallpaper and a small white ELO lockup at the lower right of the display.
An earlier logotype variation sheet in orange and gold, posted on the studio blog three weeks before the deck was submitted. At the left, a swirling lower-case e built from curved blades radiating around a centre, with Exceed League Organisation set beneath it; at the top right the same mark reduced, and at the bottom right a one-colour black version. The panel captions read reduced version and one colour vesion, the second misspelled as it is on the original.