At the end of last year, entrepreneur Andrew Paulson acquired the rights to the World Chess Championship. He asked Pentagram to re-enoble chess by branding the pinnacle of chess; giving the World Chess Championship an identity, campaign and experience that could restore its reputation as a contest between the world’s greatest minds and capture the interest of a new generation.
Partners John Rushworth, Daniel Weil and Naresh Ramchandani first created a system of names. They named Paulson’s organisation World Chess, reflecting the World Chess Championship and chess as a world game. This led to a system of names for each competition: World Chess Championship, World Chess Blitz Championship, World Chess Junior Championship, and so on.
With the names in place, they chose to bring World Chess alive through the qualities of intelligence and intensity; the exceptional intelligence needed to process every possibility and permutation that can play out across the sixty four squares, and the heightened intensity of winning or losing a contest against a mind that proves itself to be superior or inferior to your own.