David Rudnick on the “borderline impossible” process of designing a bespoke blackletter typeface for Arsenal

Reading"David Rudnick on the..."SearchFor the past four years, the designer has been building a hand-drawn, three-weight type family that pays homage to one of the most beloved players in Arsenal’s history: David Rocastle. Here, It’s Nice That sits down with David and Arsenal Creative Studio lead Johnnie Campbell to get behind the scenes of the mammoth project.ShareDesigning for football poses a unique challenge. Not only do you have to consider such a vast cross-section of applications – screens, clothing, stadium walls and much more – but also the many millions of supporters that will see it, and need to identify with it. This is exactly what faced designer David Rudnick when he embarked upon Rocastle, a bespoke three-weight blackletter type family made specially for Arsenal Football Club.The ask was this: How do you make a typeface for when Arsenal shows up in culture? For those moments when football leaves the frenetic energy of the match, when it then collides and harmonises with the worlds of fashion, art, music and more. The answer, for David and Creative Studio lead Johnnie Campbell, was buried in the Arsenal archive; the hoards of memorabilia saved by supporters, the gothic crests, paper season tickets and programmes. The groundwork for such a future-facing typeface had to be born from what came before.What might have made the challenge a little easier is the fact that David is himself an avid Arsenal supporter, and has worked with the club numerous times before. Rocastle isn’t the result of a six-month brief handed at arm’s length to a creative agency, but a labour of love from a lifelong fan. It’s also named after and dedicated to one of the club’s most legendary players, David Rocastle, more fondly known as Rocky. Joining the club at 15 and playing during the late 80s and early 90s, he made 277 appearances for the club, and fast became a beacon of hard work, humility and loyalty. In 2001, at age 33, he passed away from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. At matches today, you can still hear his name chanted in the stands.Read on to get the full picture of the years spent researching, hand-drawing, revising and perfecting the Rocastle family, and to find out David’s dream application of the typeface...This is an edited excerpt of a Q&A that took place between David Rudnick, Johnnie Campbell and It’s Nice That’s associate editor Olivia Hingley at the Design Museum on 9 October 2026 to celebrate the release of Rocastle and exhibition Arsenal by Design which ran 10-11 October.AboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa Bruneau“I knew it was crazy, but that also came from the kind of passion I think you get as a fan – we want to be the best.”David RudnickINT: Johnnie I’d love to go back to the start and get a bit of the background. Why was a bespoke typeface needed to really complete Arsenal’s current visual universe?Johnnie Campbell (JC): The Rocastle typeface was actually born from a much bigger project that we started just over four years ago. We’d updated our brand strategy in 2021/22, with the aim of putting supporters right at the heart of who we are as a club, making them feel pride and belonging in the community of Arsenal. A major part of that work was in the research phase, talking to supporters around the world and realising that whilst we’re predominantly a football club, our reach and impact stretches way beyond the 90 minutes of a match. We roughly mapped into three pillars – Team: Everything associated with the 90 minutes of a match. Community: The club’s connection to its local and global community beyond the 90 minutes. Culture: Where football intersects with fashion, art, music and more.We then set about a project to update our visual identity, and talking directly to David at the time, we worked out that we needed different ways of speaking within those spaces. One main Arsenal voice, but different tones. Because celebrating a goal at Emirates Stadium is very different to talking about a commercial partnership or a new fashion drop, for example.That spawned a huge mega brief that lasted four and a half years, where we thought about different typefaces that could give us these different tones, for different areas that the club operates in. Northbank typeface was originally for our Team pillar, Chapman was for Community, and Rocastle was the last piece to that puzzle, for us to show up in culture. However, we actually started all of them together really, so technically Rocastle has been in development for over four years.INT: Why did you decide to name the typeface Rocastle? Can you tell us a bit more about why this was such an important tribute?JC: Speaking truthfully, it was David’s idea so, I’ll let David answer... but I guess when David came to us originally with the name Rocastle, it just felt right – immediately. We knew we were always creating something that was going to be saved for the very best of Arsenal and used to really speak to culture and what makes Arsenal special.AboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa BruneauAboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa BruneauDavid Rudnick (DR): When I’m designing a typeface, the name is always a really important part. From almost the first letters, there needs to be a name – you need to understand what the typeface is trying to say, what it wants to be and where it wants to go.When we first started talking about how Arsenal could even have a system, what our voice would be, we realised that one typeface wasn’t going to cut it, nor two typefaces. We have all of these values that we represent, spaces that we show up in, ways in which we need to communicate. You could kind of see the system starting to stretch, almost infinitely out. Starting from the super intensity of the minutes and the seconds of a game and a goal announcement, (which is what the Northbank typeface became), to the time you spend with the club when you’re reading the program, or reading an interview with a favourite player and the kind of architecture that goes around that, which is what Chapman was built for.But there’s another aspect. With Arsenal, it felt like something that was far bigger and needed to be treated a very different way, where football’s not just about minutes, seconds, or even days, weeks, or months – there’s decades, there’s centuries, there’s lifetimes. Arsenal is a club that really extends so much further than what we just see around us now. There are values which are bigger than us, that have been there since starting out. Nothing spoke more to me to what that eternal idea of the club was and the values than Rocky [David Rocastle].At the top of this system we needed something completely unique and borderline impossible, typographically. Somehow it had to be this contradiction, that was forever dynamic and new and somehow felt eternal and had always been there; that it somehow felt English, but also transcended that and became universal. Coming back to it, even David’s name, Rocastle – there’s something medieval about the ‘castle’. But who Rocky is – forever modern and of the moment – is just still so incredibly present for every fan. It felt like it had to be that name.AboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa BruneauAboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa BruneauPhotography: Josh Upton“This could never be a gesture that felt egotistical, unnecessarily decorative, or was there to draw attention to it as a complex piece of typography.”David RudnickAboveRocastle – designed in terrain by David Rudnick with Léa BruneauINT: As that interesting intersection of supporter and designer, why did you want to get involved in a project of such scale and such significance? What was the moment that you realised you were taking on this massive quest?DR: Well, the club has been unbelievable, because I came to them with a completely crazy idea. I was like, ‘I want to build something no other club could have’. I wanted to build a system that makes Arsenal great forever and could only be Arsenal. To do that, it’s going to take years, we’re going to have to build it piece by piece. I just don’t think there’s almost any other football club in the world that would say yes to that. It’s a totally crazy thing. The hardest part was that it was going to take maybe four or five years, and I couldn’t even show you what it was going to look like. No one’s ever drawn one like this before.The club supported the vision, and I don’t think I could have done it without Johnnie and James [Kirkup, brand design manager at Arsenal], and all of the team having been there through the crazy five years of revisions this has all taken. I knew it was crazy, but that also came from the kind of passion I think you get as a fan – we want to be the best, and I also want the fans to feel proud of what we have. It wasn’t just something a design agency did in six months for a brief, or the club were like, ‘Oh, we need a marketing campaign, so we need a typeface.’ This was about identity, and I think that’s where it always started.INT: It definitely feels like something that could only have come from such a passionate supporter. Johnnie, from your perspective, I can imagine with a project of this magnitude, it’s a fine balance of staying true to Arsenal’s existing visual heritage while also bringing something that is future-facing to the table. How did you ensure this balance?JC: I think a lot of research, immersion. What also potentially helps is our ages – being an Arsenal supporter myself, growing up and looking at what I associate the club with. Both diving back into that and trying to find the best moments from our past, but making sure that we’re future-facing and trying to find ways in which we take a creative leap of faith. It felt natural because that’s the identity of the club that I grew up with, right? But yes, it’s that balance of making sure that you’ve done the research and that you’ve got