The Mark

A project that asks why a club's brand and mark look the way they do ought to be able to answer for its own.

The name

A local rule is one a course writes for itself. It lives on the back of the scorecard and covers whatever only exists there: the staked saplings, the ditch that is not quite a hazard, the internal out of bounds nobody can explain to a visitor. Every course in America has a set, and no two sets match.

It is the shortest honest description of a golf course anyone has written down, and the club wrote it about itself.

The rules of golf are national, the same at Lookout Mountain and at Rancho Park. How a place plays, what it charges and how it presents itself are settled locally, usually by a handful of people, usually without much scrutiny.

All of it printed on the back of the scorecard, in the part nobody reads.

No picture

A pictorial mark has to excel in several scenarios: mastheads, billboards, a 40-pixel favicon, hats, and polos. And so this one is a wordmark and a number in a box. Someday we might adopt a critter or symbol of the sport but till then, this shall suffice.

Typeface does the work

Three typefaces, each with one job. Barlow Condensed for headlines, because the letters are narrow and a long club name still fits on one line. DM Mono for labels and figures, because every character is the same width, so numbers stack in a column and can be compared at a glance. Source Serif 4 for the writing itself, because it is built to be read for a while.

No. 19 is our number

A course has 18 holes, and the card lists every one of them with a yardage and a par. That is the official version of a golf course.

The local rules are printed on the back of that card. The nineteenth hole is not on the card at all because it's where you go after a round to celebrate, complain, and reminisce your round.

It's an interesting juxtaposition and together, both tell you everything you need to know about the course that may not be in an official record. That is where this publication works. So the number is 19, and it is the only number that never appears on a scorecard.

Since No. 19 is the mark, it is never an entry. The sequence runs No. 17, No. 18, No. 20, the way a hotel skips the thirteenth floor.

That settled what goes in the box. What color the box should be took longer.

The color that did not work

The obvious answer was green.

Green is what golf reaches for, and that is the problem with it. Augusta, the club crest, the turf supplier, the tournament logo. A color everybody uses identifies nobody.

Green got a real test: every color on the wheel, each set to the same weight on the page so none had an unfair advantage. Green came through fine. So did all of them. There is no technical reason to avoid green.

Which left the only question that mattered, which is what green says before anyone has read a word. Augusta green, British racing green, the green on a Rolex crown: all of them announce themselves. Pick a quieter green to escape that and you have picked a color nobody notices.

So, no green.

The colors were already there

The answer was in the name.

Before a local rule is a sentence on the back of a scorecard, it is a physical thing. It is a stake in the ground, or a line in paint. Golf already marks its ground in four colors, and every one of them tells a player where they stand and what their options are.

That is the palette, and it is a golf palette. Not golf as decoration, which is the green everybody reaches for, but the colors the game already uses to mark ground, which is the exact thing a local rule does.

In the same order. White is the paper, because a page has a boundary too. Yellow is what asks for your attention: highlight a passage and it turns yellow, and the subscribe button is yellow for the same reason. Red marks the number box, and nothing else, ever. Blue labels the kickers, the data keys and the links. Black reads, and gray recedes.

There is no green anywhere. We will let you enjoy that out on the course.