RAST UC3M
SERVICES:BRAND IDENTITY DESIGNINDUSTRY:AUTOMOTIVE & MOTORSPORTYEAR:2025RAST UC3M is a student-led rally racing team working out of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain where hands-on engineering and real-world learning come together. Known for building and racing their own off-road vehicles, the team blends technical precision with a raw, authentic passion for racing that sets them apart from their more polished, corporate competitors. They’re collaborative, talented, and relentlessly determined, showcasing a sizeable team of young engineers who love getting stuck in, pushing through challenges, and building something from the ground up.
I was brought in to redefine their brand identity - creating a visual system that captured their resilience, authenticity, and student-built spirit, while giving them the professional image needed to maintain current and attract new sponsors.
Speaking of text, the typography selection for RAST UC3M needed to be perfect. Well, actually imperfect. Perfectly imperfect.
Before jumping into visuals, I needed to understand what really drives RAST UC3M - not just how the vehicles they build, but how they think, plan, and operate as a team.
That meant stepping back from aesthetics and digging into their story, their culture, and the challenges they face as a student-run engineering team competing in a world dominated by bigger, glossier, more resourced rivals.
The team needed a brand that would help them grow - one that could strengthen their reputation with sponsors, attract new engineering talent, and communicate what makes them different at a glance. So I spent time understanding their internal dynamics, their audience needs, and the competitive landscape.
While other university teams leaned into sleek, corporate aesthetics, RAST UC3M had something those teams couldn’t fake: an authentic spirit built on grit, collaboration, and hands-on engineering. From a competitive advantage POV, the role of the new brand became clear - capture that raw, student-built authenticity and turn it into a cohesive identity system that could work everywhere from sponsorship decks to the side of their vehicles, without diluting who they are.
Avoiding expected rally racing motifs, I needed to dig deeper into what RAST UC3M stood for. This meant learning about their history and where their brand came from.
The team had been through a couple of different brand identities over the years. Central to their most recent rebrand, pictured top right, was a custom wordmark logo system with a bunch of different orientations. Minimalist in form and italicised for speed, it was designed to put their most professional foot forward and position them as a sound investment for new sponsors.
But in doing so, it lost something. It lacked personality making it hard for anyone, sponsors included, to connect with them on a deeper level.
After chatting with the team some more, I learned their original logo was a scorpion, pictured top left. It represented their resilience, tenacity and adaptability to overcome new challenges perfectly. So why move away from it? This felt waaaay more them. Honouring their roots whilst subverting the other hyper-polished, corporate uni rally teams felt like the right way to go.
You know when you see those rally cars with every conceivable spot covered with a logo or tagline? What if we could do that but with just the RAST UC3M brand? Own the space that intrinsically screams rally team. This was the central idea behind creating a bunch of different badges and lock ups that gave them so much flexibility they’d be hard-pressed to find an application their didn’t have a logo for.
With the attack-ready position of the scorpion forming a sort of pseudo-triangle, it gave me a great base to play with various badge container shapes. Finally, I settled on this sawn-off triangle shape, which if you squint hard enough and add connective lines between the text, becomes a tank-like track or tire.
This would speak to their hands-on approach and authentic love for the sport whilst tying in well with the natural subject matter of the brand mark. After some subtle customisations to the wordmark to amp up the handmade vibe, I set to work on the rest of the type system.
The trouble with mega bold, expressive typography is that it doesn’t scale well and is a nightmare to read in any sentence longer than a couple of words. So, to bring some professionalism and legibility to the identity, I introduced Good Headline Pro for longer copy and Ballinger Mono for accents and use on technical drawings.
Next, the thorny issue of colour. Given the environment RAST UC3M’s vehicles race in — arid deserts, muddy forests, dirty tracks — selecting a colour palette was relatively simple. Inject a burst of energy through a vibrant orange and electric green/yellow (grellow, if you will) to express the adrenaline-fuelled nature of their sport, and bring in earthy tones and organic hues to act as ballast. Together, this creates a harmonious palette that stands out in the industry and speaks authentically to their roots.
Once I dialled in the right pose, expression and style for the scorpion, which took no less than a million attempts, I set to work on finding the best solution for housing this little fella in a tidy, compact badge.
“As a student rally competition team, brand image had never been one of our main priorities. However, with the growing importance of social media as a key tool to share our project and initiatives, we felt it was finally time for a proper facelift.
Out of the overwhelming number of graphic designers we considered for this job, it was Jack who completely stole our hearts — we didn’t hesitate for a second to reach out to him.
From the very first call, we knew we’d made the right choice. What started as a simple conversation quickly turned into the perfect creative match. Jack immediately understood our vision, and the final result was not only aligned with what we had imagined — it was exactly what we needed. Simply ideal.
Being a great graphic designer takes more than talent, and Jack has both the skill and the soul. He’s not only incredibly capable on the technical side, but also shines with his people skills. Communicative, attentive, humble — just a few of the words we’d use to describe the professional (and person) he is.”
Elivra
Rally Student Team Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
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