Fila made its way to success with the so-called F-box logo. In the 1980s, it introduced a larger emblem, which has stayed almost the same ever since.
The Italian company was born in 1911 in the small town of Biella, Italy. While today it’s known as a sporting goods brand, initially Fila manufactured clothes for the people of the Italian Alps. The brand has been based in South Korea since 2007.
On the old version of the Fila logo, you could see a stylized letter “F” inside a dark blue box with the white filling. The glyph was broken into two parts. On the top, there was a red horizontal bar. Below, the other half of the “F” was seen, which looked more like an “L” rotated 90 degrees to the right.
This was exactly the way the logo looked on the outfits worn by Swedish tennis champion Björn Borg (the contract was signed in 1975), the legendary mountain climber Reinhold Messner, and the former World Cup alpine ski racer from Sweden Ingemar Stenmark (1986).
In the late 1980s, the company introduced a new logotype. Based on the old F-box icon, it now included the full name of the brand in the letters of the same style. The snakelike glyphs were given in dark blue with an optional thin red outline and an optional red filling inside the “A.” The last letter didn’t look exactly the way an “A” is supposed to look: the horizontal bar moved down and had a gap at the left. Also, the “A” and the “L” didn’t have a gap between them, which made them look like a single glyph (or even a snake or worm).
The wordmark was presumably drawn by hand specifically for the company. However, if you want a font that looks the same, you may try the Contemporary ONE typeface developed by Yuliyan Ilev. The letters “F,” “I,” “L,” and “A” are an exact copy of the Fila logo, while all the other glyphs were inspired by the sports company emblem. The initial release of the type took place in the spring of 2010.
While the company has almost always used dark blue, red, and white for the logo palette, it has been experimenting with the shades pretty much. For instance, the vintage F-box icon from the Björn Borg and Reinhold Messner era featured a very dark shade of blue (very much like the current one), while later you could come across the emblem in lighter hues. The combination of red and dark blue is prevalent in the world of sports logos, so the choice appears to be quite generic. However, it also conjures up such associations as energy and vitality (red), loyalty and reliability (blue).