Why Boc Studio rehabilitated CE Europa instead of redesigning it — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

CE Europa has been rooted in the Vila de Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona since 1907, and is one of only 10 football clubs that co-founded La Liga, Spain’s top division. Member-owned, its supporters are called the escapulats – named for the scapular band that has crossed the shirt for a century. CE Europa already had the history and the people behind it, but not an identity that reflected either, so it turned to Barcelona-based Boc Studio for an update.

The club’s instruction was to ‘change the minimum.’ Rather than redesign the identity from scratch, Boc Studio set out to rehabilitate it, treating the century-old crest the way a restorer would treat a protected façade – repairing and sharpening what was there instead of completely replacing it. “Our biggest concern was losing authenticity,” explains Anna Clemente, Brand Manager & Creative Director at CE Europa. “We didn’t want a new identity that felt imposed; we wanted one that felt like it had always belonged to the club.”

Before it touched anything, the studio worked back through the crest’s history to separate what was redundant from what genuinely felt like the club. “The rule was simple: make it better, don’t change it,” detail Co-founders & Creative Directors, Jordi Canals and Oriol Bada; the aim was “not to make the Europa look like this year, but to make sure it still looks like itself in a hundred more.” They redrew it with cleaner proportions and a rationalised construction so it could shrink to an app icon without losing its character, the continuous gold contour giving the silhouette weight on a mural and then filling in as a solid at small sizes.

Two decisions tested that rule. The studio proposed replacing the crest’s football goal with the year 1907, set into the design like the date on a restored façade, reasoning that two footballing elements side by side were redundant. The club objected and it broke Boc Studio’s own rule, so the change was dropped. The one alteration that held firm, and drew some internal heat, was removing the fourth white stripe at the top so the remaining lines sit at a 45-degree angle, crossing proportionally with the corners of the crest, a decision with history behind it. The real test came from lifelong members, some with the old crest tattooed on their chest. “They saw their crest – only sharper,” the pair tells us. No one pushed back.

Boc Studio created a piece of software for the club that records sound from the crowd and turns it into one of four patterns – Escapulat, Heartbeat, Tifo and Wave – each recolourable into countless variations, every wave dialled up or down for passion. AI opened up the possibility, but the studio keeps it as the means rather than the subject. “With all honesty, it’s an expression, not science. It’s football,” Canals and Bada explain.

In the software, the studio locked what could not move: the crest, untouchable and intact; the closed palette and its combinations; the geometry and motion of the waves. Whatever someone makes with it still comes out as unmistakably Europa. Handing a live tool to a client is a bold move, but Boc Studio saw the members, custodians of the identity for more than a century, as its rightful keepers. “The tool doesn’t give them the brand,” they add. “It gives them back the means of producing it.”

Murri Studio drew a bespoke typeface built from the scapular, making the same diagonal that crosses the shirt cut through the letterforms. The type is condensed and high-impact, referencing the club’s hand-painted signage, made to be read “across a pitch or from the other side of a bar,” as the studio puts it.

The colour palette was tightened rather than fully replaced. Navy and white belong to Europa as much as to Gràcia and to hundreds of other clubs, but a century of reproductions had scattered the palette into a drift of blues, yellows and oranges, so the studio closed it to one navy, one gold and white. The only addition is a red brought forward from a t-shirt in the club’s archive that everyone loved. “Our small stamp,” as the pair notes – kept in check by one rule: navy and red never touch.

“The crest is the constitution; the escapulat is the street,” the founders explain. The crest never bends, keeping the same construction and dignity on a federation document or a lamppost, while all the informality comes from everything around it. It is a stance against a game that increasingly flattens century-old designs into logos built for the phone. “Supporters immediately recognised themselves in the concept,” Clemente adds. For Boc Studio, the argument reaches past the badge: “in a city, and a sport, being sold piece by piece, the most radical act is remaining what you are.”