Shuka Design designed World Chess Games Identity. 2011 was a significant year for chess. After media entrepreneurs Andrew Polson and Ilya Merenzon acquired the rights to hold chess tournaments on behalf of FIDE, they’ve founded the World Chess and launched an intensive rebranding campaign, accompanied first by the British studio Pentagram and followed by Shuka brand bureau from Moscow. The ambition was to return the game its former glory by fitting it into the digital environment. To make it a new Formula 1, but leisurely and sophisticated.

Pentagram provided the brand architecture, the company logo, and an identity for the 2014 Championship, which was implemented two years earlier in London on the first tournament of the Grand Prix. The line «The best mind wins» aimed to “restore (chess) reputation as a contest between the world’s greatest minds and capture the interest of a new generation”.

2016 World Chess Championship in New York identity was already supported by Shuka, but it was the year 2017, when during the Berlin Candidates Tournament bureau first presented the work completely, spreading the graphics on public relations and marketing materials, digital broadcasting platform, venue branding, and merchandise. The same year Shuka designed a consistent visual hierarchy for all World Chess offline and online communication and began preparing for 2018 Championship in London.

The line “The best mind wins” was replaced by “The world is watching” to show chess is a very intimate and social affair. The risky and provocative design was so unusual for a chess event that it became the most talked-about chess design in history.

“Pawnagraphic” campaign and art have revolutionized the way chess is perceived by media and fans alike. For ages, it was one of the most conservative sports. The campaign instantly turned chess into an edgy, modern, and boundary-pushing sport with a strong social and humanistic angle. 2018 Championship found itself in the center of a heated discussion about design, sex, gay culture, and while at it, it turned out that the sport attracted significant attention among millennials.

The identity for Grand Prix in Moscow, Riga, Hamburg, and Jerusalem followed and led the partnership between World Chess and Shuka to “Armageddon”, a chess blitz tournament (two seconds per move, it’s almost a darts) produced for live broadcasting — the format, by which World Chess broke the stereotype that chess is incompatible with the new media. “Armageddon” was broadcasted on “Match-TV” in prime-time: the grandmasters played sitting on artificial fragments of stones inside of a glowing cube. Heart rate monitors connected to them were showing to the audience how the tension was growing.

The identity of the tournament demonstrated World Chess at a new stage of chess popularization. It is the language of a company offering a modern product to a fast consumption audience. The style interprets the New Testament plot of the end of the world in the aesthetics of cyberpunk and exaggeratedly fills the screens with drama. Prime-time Armageddon — sharp edges of medieval Gothic graphemes-spears on a red-and-black chess field.