Typeface Design for Champion Cond

Sports jersey lettering treated to body-typeface-level R&D

LL Champion is an angular slab serif family designed by Weichi He at Lineto between 2019 and 2023, released in 2024, with font engineering and mastering by Alphabet, Berlin. It applies a rigorous R&D process—more typical of refined body text typefaces—to the historically improvised varsity jersey lettering genre. The family spans three weights and two widths, includes slab serif and sans serif variants, and introduces Carved and Shadow layering versions.

Set in LL Champion

Insights

Weight and width range was determined with the aid of extrapolation rather than drawn manually across all axes.
Duplexing—fixed box width across the three weights per style—is a novelty for the varsity genre and reinforces the family's mechanical construction logic.
The Carved version appears in the slab serif context and evokes a 3-D impression; the Shadow version accompanies Champion Sans and supports independent use or layered color composition.
Alternates were selectively reintroduced to recover the eclectic character of historical varsity lettering within an otherwise strictly systematic system.