Having been in place since 2015, the banners wrapped around the exterior of Celtic Park became a firm favourite with supporters and visitors to Celtic Park – known to Celtic fans the world over as ‘Paradise’. 

In 2022, with the league title secured, and a new manager playing an exciting brand of football, the club approached Maguires to create a fresh progressive design for the stadium.

After undertaking a period of creative development with the client, we proposed a modular graphic approach that still celebrated the Celtic story, but also reflected the club’s current position and culture.

Visually, this graphic approach would allow us to unify the look of the stadium by increasing the presence of green across all four stands – creating a ‘beacon of green’ that would further highlight the presence of the stadium across the city.

Visible from several miles away, the two larger goal-end stands would act as gateways to the stadium, with clear messaging welcoming fans to Celtic Park. Given pride of place in the centre of the design are two of the club’s most celebrated captains, representing the club’s European triumph in 1967 as well as their recent successes.

The two small corner stands provided an opportunity to include a greater depth of detail. Here we created an array of graphic elements and iconography from Celtic’s past, highlighting the club’s culture, ethos, icons and achievements. From the famous quote from legendary Celtic manager Jock Stein, “Football without the fans is nothing” to the crisp vertical pinstripes first worn in the early 80s by legends including Danny McGrain and Paul McStay, each square within the design tells a story.

The banner designs also saw the introduction of an expanded colour palette. In addition to the classic green and white, we introduced a range of complementary greens, influenced by a number of iconic away strips. 

Finally, the evolution of the Celtic brand throughout its 134 year history is also reflected in the varied choice of font styles used – from the retro letter forms of ‘1888’ to the modern condensed fonts of the 21st century. 

Drone footage courtesy of HawkAye

Following the post-pandemic return of supporters to football stadiums in Scotland, Celtic Football Club approached Maguires to design the banners that line the paved approach to the front of the stadium – known as ‘The Celtic Way’.

Having worked with the club in 2020 to redesign the tunnel and player areas within the stadium, we had begun developing a strong typographical style based upon key figures and phrases from the club’s history, coupled with a tweaked colour palette. The club were keen to see this new style adapted to The Celtic Way, with the message ‘One Club Since 1888’ brought to life.

We decided to approach the design of all 20 banners separately, giving each word and date their own unique typographic treatment, encased within green and white blocks to mimic the famous Celtic hoops when viewed together.

The variety of designs provided for the banners were so wide-ranging that the club decided to incorporate a variety of the graphic elements into the match day comms created by their in-house team for the upcoming season.

Following a successful pitch, Maguires were employed to provide the creative concept and graphic style for Celtic Football Club’s Christmas campaign.

The brief was to highlight the array of international talent now assembled at Celtic Park, following the appointment of Australian manager Ange Postecoglou earlier in the year.

We created the campaign strapline ‘Sending Cheer Far & Near’ with an accompanying logo and graphic style, which takes its visual cues from international travel and Santa’s mail room.

As well as designing the annual gift catalogue, we provided a comprehensive campaign toolkit and guide for the Celtic in-house team to use across over 500 sales assets. In addition to this, many of the graphic assets were featured prominently in the highly successful campaign film, produced by Arteus.

Following a successful pitch, Maguires were appointed to provide a creative multi-channel campaign to promote the sale of 2019/20 season tickets for Celtic Football Club.

Celtic Park, known to fans simply as ‘Paradise’, has long been considered one of football’s greatest venues. Over the years, many of the sport’s biggest names have lined up to praise the unique atmosphere generated on match days at ‘Paradise’.

“I’ve been fortunate to play in some great stadiums in Europe with Barcelona but none compare to Celtic. The atmosphere their fans create make it a very special European night of football.”
Lionel Messi

“Anyone going to Celtic Park now is saying, ‘You’ve got to beat that atmosphere, the energy they spend in their games’.”
Sir Alex Ferguson

We wanted to highlight this unique atmosphere in our approach, with a compelling call to action and strong visual style that would highlight this unrivalled energy created by the fans.

The notion of the crowd being the ‘12th man’ is not a new one. However, what if the power generated by the fans was so strong it bestowed super-human powers upon the players?

We called this the ‘Power of Paradise’.

By asking fans to renew their season ticket, we appealed to them to ‘Unleash the Power of Paradise’ – a rallying call that would result in the players being even faster, stronger, and more powerful next season as a result.

We created six ‘hero’ images highlighting certain ‘powers’ attributed to key players, allowing us to create a distinct and varied campaign for deployment across press and outdoor, as well as the club’s own social channels.

As part of our initial pitch, we suggested creating an accompanying video to the main campaign. With the concept behind the video being how the stars of the campaign would act with such powers in the day-to-day routine of training.

Working with production company Arteus and Celtic’s in-house production team, we created the ‘Power of Paradise’ video – a more light-hearted look at our heroes and how their powers come into play at training. The video amassed over 168,000 views on Facebook alone, with the outtakes a further 71,000 views.

All 10,000 spaces on the waiting list for season tickets were filled with over a month to go before the May 10th deadline.