The Italian football club Bologna based in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, was established in 1909. Its brand identity has been inspired by the heraldic symbols of its home city.
Meaning and history
1946 — 1991
Although the Bologna logo has undergone a lot of modifications, for most of its history, it has had the same structure and core elements.
One of them is the combination of red and blue stripes. This pattern is used not only for the logo but for the players’ shirts, too. Moreover, the club is even nicknamed “Rossoblu” (“Red and blue”). The reason why these colors had been chosen was pretty simple – they came from the official palette of the city of Bologna.
1991 — 1993
The logo Bologna FC uses also sports a red cross on a white field, which is known as St. George’s Cross. It can be seen on both the flag and the coat of arms of the city of Bologna, as well as many other cities in Italy and other countries, to say nothing of England, which has the red cross on its flag.
1993 — 2018
The Bologna logo, created in 1993, stayed with the club for more than two decades and became a basis for the current emblem of the Italian football team. The badge featured a vertically stretched oval crest, which was visually divided into two equal parts. The left one, with the vertical blue and red striped pattern, and the right one with a Red Cross in a blue outline, set on a white background. The upper part of the crest was colored solid blue and had a fancy white “BFC” lettering set in all capitals of a handwritten typeface, and complemented by the bold white “1909” datemark.
2018 — Today
The redesign of 2018 left all the elements of the Bologna Football Club’s visual identity almost untouched. The contours were refined and strengthened, but the concept and disposition were not changed. The main thing of this redesign is about the color palette. There are still red and white shades on the BFC logo, but red turned into burgundy, and blue is now used in its darkest shade possible, looking more black. The new color scheme made the logo of the club stronger and added a sense of danger and aggressiveness.
Colors
The color scheme has been undoubtedly inspired by that of the coat of arms of the city of Bologna. All the four colors – red, blue, white, and yellow – appear on the city’s crest. The football logo, though, is simpler. It doesn’t have, for instance, the diversity of shades of yellow that the city’s coat of arms boasts.
Bologna Colors
NAVY BLUE
HEX COLOR: #1A2F48;
RGB: (26 47 72)
CMYK: (93 78 46 44)
RED
HEX COLOR: #A21C26;
RGB: (162 28 38)
CMYK: (24 100 93 19)
WHITE
HEX COLOR: #FFFFFF;
RGB: (255 255 255)
CMYK: (0 0 0 0)
LIGHT SILVER
HEX COLOR: #ECECEC;
RGB: (236 236 236)
CMYK: (6 4 4 0)