Lesmahagow
Highland Games
Heritage, community, and a visual identity built to carry tradition forward.
Lesmahagow Highland Games is a long-running community event with deep local roots and a strong sense of tradition. The aim of the project was to create a refreshed identity and digital presence that respected that heritage without feeling dated, cluttered, or stuck in the past. The result is a clearer, more versatile visual system designed to work across event promotion, merchandise, public-facing communication, and a new website experience.
Logo System
Primary Logo
Submark (Light)
Submark (Dark)
Kids Marketing Logo
A flexible logo suite designed to work across heritage-led event branding, family promotion, merchandise, signage, and digital communication.
The system balances Scottish visual cues, geometric structure, and event-day atmosphere, helping the identity feel distinctive, recognisable, and easy to apply across a wide range of uses.
Research & Development
The identity was shaped through first-hand visual research, wider market analysis, symbol exploration, and iterative logo development, with the aim of creating something that felt both rooted in tradition and fit for modern use.
Event Visual Research
Having experienced the Games over many years, the early visual research focused on distilling the atmosphere, colours, rituals, and community feel of the event into something cohesive. The goal was to capture that sense of familiarity and pride without slipping into visual clutter or nostalgia for its own sake.
Market Visual Research
Wider visual research looked at Highland Games, Scottish festivals, heritage marks, and event branding more broadly. This helped identify opportunities to create something more distinctive and ownable, while still feeling recognisably Scottish and appropriate to the event’s cultural context.
Sketching
Initial sketch work explored monograms, bunting motifs, angular forms, and abstract ways of representing the spirit of the Games. The focus was on finding a mark that could feel symbolic and memorable, while still being simple enough to work across everything from posters to merchandise.
Logo Development
The final identity developed through a process of refinement, reducing the earlier ideas into a stronger geometric mark system with clearer structure and more flexibility. The result is a logo suite that feels rooted in tradition while being far easier to scale, reproduce, and apply across modern event branding.
Brand System
Typography
League Spartan brings the identity a strong, confident headline style, while Source Sans 3 keeps supporting information clear, practical, and easy to read across posters, signage, and digital content.
Brand Colours
The palette combines deep red, navy, green, warm neutrals, and brighter accent tones to reflect both the heritage and community character of the Games. Together, they help the identity feel grounded, welcoming, and versatile enough to work across everything from family-focused promotion to merchandise and event graphics.
Brand in use
The identity was designed to work where the event meets the public: across posters, merchandise, children’s promotion, digital communication, and the many small branded touchpoints that help the Games feel more cohesive and recognisable.
…The result is a heritage-led identity designed to help a long-standing community event feel prouder, clearer, and more future-ready.
Need branding that feels more considered than “that’ll do”?
Whether you’re building something new, refreshing something tired, or trying to make your organisation look more like the level it’s already operating at, I can help shape an identity that feels clear, confident, and built to last.