DC’s most maniacal female antihero Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie, leads the first Suicide Squad spin-off movie, out tomorrow and titled: Birds of Prey: and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. As for its graphic identity, Pentagram’s Emily Oberman and her team have designed a logo, custom typeface and visual language that channels the character’s traits, plays to the style of the film, and is visibly packed with easter eggs for fans to lap up.

Though the project began too early for the design team to watch the film for inspiration, they read the script and watched a short film by director Cathy Yan, made to convey her vision. “It was thrilling and powerful and funny. We were all in as soon as we saw it – not that we weren’t already,” Oberman tells It’s Nice That.

Harley’s overall graphic language is designed to convey the character herself: “silly, optimistic, strong, confident, funny, sassy, and more than a little crazy,” says Oberman. Some aspects of this come through the Birds of Prey logo, which uses a bold, blocky type (an altered version of Smart Sans) with weapons hidden amidst the letters. These represent the other members of the Birds of Prey and their personalities – Huntress, Black Canary, Cassandra and Officer Montoya.

“The weapons kind of presented themselves in a few of the letterforms and when we saw how great they could be, Laura (Berglund of Pentagram) did an amazing job of finding more and more ways to sneak things in,” she continues. “Of course they had to relate to each character. My favourites are the brass knuckle E and the dagger hidden in the S.” The neon colours were inspired by the “copious and detailed mood boards” that Cathy Yan created for the whole film.