Case study · Logo & Brand Identity

Element18

Premium Golf Bag Brand Identity

Element18 is a premium golf bag brand whose mark has to survive being stitched a couple of inches wide on a pocket. That constraint came first, before a single line was drawn.

Sports Equipment BrandingLogo DesignBrand Identity

Client

Element18

Discipline

Logo & Brand Identity

Deliverables

Sports Equipment Branding, Logo Design, Brand Identity, Product Mockup Design, Embroidery-Ready Design

Designing for the needle first

Most marks are drawn as flat artwork and shrunk down afterward, which is how brands end up with a logo that looks fine on a screen and turns to mush in thread. Embroidery has no patience for fine detail or soft transitions. Starting at final stitched size rather than arriving there changed what the mark could be made of, and everything that followed came out of that limit.

I built the E from three stacked bars with no spine holding them, a form lifted from the yardage markers on a course. That small borrowing is what lifts the logotype above being a set of initials, because it means something specific to the person the bag is made for and nothing at all to anyone else. The 8 is cut with chamfered corners that echo the bar ends, so E18 sits as one object rather than a letter beside a number.

Contrast doing the heavy lifting

Two colorways carry the system, maroon and white against black, and I picked both for contrast rather than for mood. Thread cannot do subtlety, so the difference between a mark that holds and a mark that fills in is almost always how far apart the two values sit. The counters inside the 8 stay open for the same reason.

Placement was treated as part of the design rather than as an afterthought. The mark goes where a buyer of expensive gear instinctively looks for it, on the side panel, the collar and the pocket, and it appears at the size those positions actually allow. The full logotype, with the name letterspaced and the number picked out in maroon, takes the larger applications. E18 works alone everywhere else, which is the whole argument for having drawn it that way to begin with.