Williams Racing FW42, 2019 Brand & Livery Development

With the departure of Martini at the end of the 2018 F1 season it gave us the prime opportunity to address and uplift the Williams Racing look and feel.

My role within the project was to lead the entirety of the livery and brand project and also work with the car paint shop and engineering and production teams in order to implement the new livery and paint scheme across all collateral items.

I also lead the colour development project and worked closely with PPG to develop custom colours and paint samples.

Here is a little insight to how i did it…

Research and development

Like any good design project a key part of the design process is to research other brands and in this case the F1 grid and evaluate where we wanted to take the direction of our new brand image.

We also needed to identify where we currently sat amongst the other F1 teams.

During the 2014-2018 there were 10 teams on the F1 grid and only 4 of them had a solid colour scheme that is recognizable throughout the years.

The below shows the colour schemes in use and shows how Williams sits amongst them.

From the graphic below it is clear to see that we were undoubtedly bold and recognizable with our iconic Martini branding but once that is gone how do we retain that striking image and grow it into something everyone will recognize and admire?

The evolution of team liveries

The richest teams on the F1 grid have all got one thing in common, they have a strong identifiable brand image and have organically developed their car livery, especially over the last 10 years. The below images show how Mercedes and Ferrari have evolved their livery and demonstrates the subtle changes they have made whilst sustaining a strong image.

With the imminent departure of Martini it gave us the opportunity to take on this ethos and explore a new foundation of which we can set and organically grow.

Mercedes

Scuderia Ferrari

Colour

Williams is known internally for its use of Blue and if we were a football team you could almost certainly guess that most of the staff would chose Blue as the team shirts colour. In reality, our livery has never really had a solid consistent base colour and you could argue that the most prominent and consistent colour through every one of our cars has been White.

Moving into the new era of F1 with the industry grasping for the attention of newer and younger audiences and exploring the world of digital / virtual championships (esports) we hit a new point where by car livery design and brand colour is more important than it has ever been before.The below shows colour variations of what Williams could organically take on whilst retaining the values.

The following graphic shows examples of colour gradient applications working in conjunction to our existing sponsors.

These concepts were created and purposely designed to be plain, simple and used as a guide to help you understand how colours influence the initial impact of a car and its sponsors.

From the development of the above the decision and direction for the future brand was decided and we then began working on livery concepts and colour development.

We began working with the senior management team and our partners at PPG to developed a more modern, fresh and bespoke tone of blue of which we call Williams Electric Blue.

This new Electric blue has many unique bespoke properties built into it, one of these properties is a subtle colour flip of which changes from light blue to darker blue depending on the light source and angle of view.

As part of the livery design process we created multiple alliterations of concepts using this new colour and explored many alternative and more traditional concepts using more angular and aggressive shapes.

Here are a just a small handful of examples:

The final FW42 design

In the end the senior board felt strongly for the liveries we had produced in example colour gradient graphics and the decision was made by them to take the look in a completely new direction and pursue the development of a faded livery design, and with that the FW42 livery was born…

FW42 design with ROKiT branding Added

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