Major League Baseball has unveiled a new visual identity built around a family of custom typefaces designed to echo the sport's own past. The refresh, developed with the New York-based branding agency Mother Design, is rolling out across the league's app, ballparks, social channels and special events, and it leaves the famous silhouetted batter logo untouched.
The project began after MLB moved into its new headquarters in New York City in 2020. The league asked Mother Design to help expand professional baseball's fandom and talent, and to make its visual identity feel unified. Work on the new brand architecture started in late 2022 and began appearing in 2024 on a rolling basis. The silhouetted batter logo, designed in 1968 by Jerry Dior, was kept as it was, while the MLB wordmark was updated to fit into a larger system that is now complete.
At the center of the refresh is a font book produced by five type designers and foundries, each chosen for a specific specialty. The result is a set of five typefaces: MLB Franklin, MLB Clarendon, MLB Flare, MLB Block and MLB Script. Each was selected because it draws on a style that existed in baseball in the early 20th century in some form.
MLB Script was designed by the Bay Area foundry OH no Type Co., chosen for its attention to unexpected, quirky details. The variable typeface includes flags, the horizontal stripe from a word's final letter that underlines the word and looks distinctly like baseball. MLB Flare, a handlettering style, was created by the Uruguayan foundry Tipotype with the aim of feeling warm and charming. Its cofounders, Martín Sommaruga and Vicente Lamónaca, said the design reflects the long tradition of Latin American players in MLB. «There is a long tradition of Latin American players in MLB, so the Latin influence is naturally part of the game,» they said in an email. «The Latin community also has a strong presence not as a distinctive feature, but as a fundamental part of the sport itself.»
MLB Franklin is a customized version of a classic American grotesque sans-serif by the type designer Nick Sherman. It is the kind of face used on scoreboards, and it could be seen in stadiums during the recent World Series. MLB Clarendon is a customized classic slab serif found throughout baseball history, which the type designer David Jonathan Ross gave added flexibility in weights and widths. Skye Dillon, a type designer who specializes in sports branding and designed the 2026 MLB All-Star Game style guide, created the octagonal MLB Block. It is based on letterforms found on jersey names and numerals and on lettering at venues such as Ebbets Field, the now-vanished ballpark where the Dodgers played when they were based in Brooklyn.
Mother Design's research drew on books, baseball cards, ticket stubs, felt letters, and the history, venues and ephemera of individual clubs. The goal, according to Mark Sloan, the agency's New York City head of design, was to find visual throughlines that reach back the furthest yet still feel relevant, as if designed today. He said the new typefaces must honor tradition while working on retina screens and in extremely small spaces, as well as in large, emphatic moments.
Sloan described baseball as a visual history of the country itself, and argued that the sport has helped keep many typographic styles alive in popular culture. «If you look at something like baseball script, for example, it's something that as Americans, it's in our visual consciousness,» he said. «It sort of comes in and out of fashion in the world of branding, but it's always been in fashion in baseball.»