Inside Palermo’s Fresh New Identity

Palermo, though, had good reason not to follow that route. Few clubs begin with such useful raw material. The pink and black, the eagle and Sicily, to name a few. A city whose architecture, language and culture have been shaped by centuries of different influences passing through it. When you already have an identity that distinctive, reinventing it would seem a particularly strange place to start. Which is, largely, why Palermo hasn’t.

Working alongside the club and City Football Group, creative agency Alkemy spent more than a year developing Palermo’s new brand strategy and visual identity. Crucially, much of that time wasn’t spent designing at all. Supporters, players, staff, club legends, management and partners were involved in an extended listening process designed to understand what Palermo already meant before deciding how it should present itself next.

It sounds simple enough, and it also feels the opposite of treating a football club like a blank consumer brand. The resulting identity is organised around four ideas – Mosaic, Pink/Black, Born to Fly and Appartenenza, or belonging – but it is the first that does most of the visual work. Palermo has spent centuries absorbing different cultures and influences, from its Arab-Norman history to its position within the wider Mediterranean. Rather than trying to clean up that mixture, Alkemy has made it the point.

That means an identity with considerably more going on than the average football brand system. There are three bespoke type families rather than one, created specifically for Palermo and designed to collide, intertwine and appear alongside each other. Different typographic personalities can take control depending on the context, producing layouts that can be elegant in one moment and intentionally chaotic in the next.

For a city as visually dense as Palermo, that feels appropriate. Too much, in fact, is part of the philosophy. The club had already teased the wider project through its “Palermo, Too Much Is Never Too Much” campaign, and the new identity carries some of that same confidence: there is no particular desire to sand the edges off.

Even the colour palette has been handled sensibly. Palermo has worn pink for more than a century and, in an era when football clubs spend fortunes trying to manufacture visual recognition, already possesses a colour that does the job almost instantaneously.

So pink stays pink. Black remains alongside it. The system simply expands around the pair, introducing colours drawn from Palermo itself and giving its most recognisable codes more space to operate. The textures and photography follow the same thinking, looking towards the city rather than attempting to turn it into an art-directed postcard.

Perhaps most interestingly, none of this required another badge reveal. Palermo’s current crest remains in place. Instead of asking a single mark to communicate every part of the club’s personality, Alkemy has built an ecosystem around it – one capable of stretching from the Renzo Barbera to digital content, merchandise, campaigns and club communications as the identity is progressively rolled out.

And that feels significant given where Palermo now finds itself. The club has been part of City Football Group since 2022 and makes no secret of ambitions that extend far beyond Sicily. The obvious temptation would be to make Palermo easier to understand internationally by making it cleaner, simpler and more universal.

Its new identity, though, makes the more interesting argument: that becoming global doesn’t have to mean becoming generic.  

Palermo already had the pink, the history, the noise and the cultural collision. The clever part here was recognising that the best way to make the club feel bigger was not to invent something new, but to give everything that was already there a louder voice.