When Norway’s nationwide soccer workforce first experimented with kits that used a font impressed by the runic alphabet, an historical Scandinavian written language utilized by Vikings, it was too exhausting to learn.
Characters on Norway’s 2024 jerseys had been jagged, sharp, and never simply discernible. On the nation’s residence kits, they had been beveled and much more troublesome to make out, baffling loads of first-time viewers. Plus, they didn’t adhere to FIFA’s guidelines for the typography of World Cup kits to be “clearly legible and distinguishable from a distance” for gamers, officers, spectators, and the media.
So for the 2026 World Cup, Norway’s first look within the match since 1998, Nike, which makes their kits, helped the workforce design a brand new font that balances readability with heritage.
The typeface used for Norway’s uniforms known as Taakeferd, a Norwegian phrase which means “journey by means of the fog.” It nods to the nation’s return to the World Cup for the primary time in 28 years.
FIFA rules additionally specify the sizing and placement of participant names and numbers on uniforms, and so they have to be in Latin characters, although they’ll use diacritical marks, like accents and umlauts.
With Norway headed to the quarterfinals Saturday towards England, it’s clear Taakeferd handed the take a look at. The typeface consists of vertical or diagonal strains, which makes for distinctive, triangular shapes on curved Latin letterform in letters like B and R.
The Nike design workforce designed Taakeferd in partnership with the Norwegian Soccer Federation; the aim was to create kits that felt unmistakably Norwegian.
Norway’s residence equipment relies on the nation’s flag—a crimson, white, and blue Scandinavian cross—and its away equipment is all black. A Viking-style font for the names, numbers, and “Norge” written on the within again collar certain helped.
Nike says the typeface was designed after in depth analysis.
“We studied the Runic alphabet’s angular strokes and sharp geometry, then tailored these design strains to work inside the trendy Roman [Latin] alphabet, preserving the runic DNA, whereas conserving the typography clear, legible on broadcast, and unmistakably modern,” a spokesperson for Nike’s design workforce tells Quick Firm.
“Quite a few iterations of most letters and numbers had been created earlier than touchdown on the ultimate model, and readability was clearly a driving constraint by means of that course of, not an afterthought,” the Nike spokesperson says. “The result’s a customized typeface that lets each participant put on a chunk of Norway’s historical past on their again.”
Runic alphabets had been utilized by Nordic and different European peoples till concerning the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and their tall, angular letterforms nonetheless encourage sort designers as we speak. Noto Sans Runic is an open supply Google font and sans-serif typeface for texts within the historic European Runic script, whereas modern typefaces like Notdef, Nordic, and Norse strategy runic-inspired shapes in their very own methods.
For Norway’s nationwide workforce, Taakeferd retains the runic model intact with sharp angles and distinctive characters you received’t discover on some other workforce’s jerseys, translating this typographic historical past for the remainder of the world.
