Stylogenyin the style of Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)

Counterculture · 1968–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & North Africa, Southeast Asia, North America

Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)

Also known as Ultras style, Tifo, Striscioni (curva banners), Coreografie (curva choreographies), Ultras Liberi lettering

The graphic language of Italy's organised football supporters, the ultras, from the late 1960s, and of the groups that copied them across Europe, North Africa and beyond. Each group paints its name in huge, squared, tightly packed capitals on a long cloth hung along the railing of the curva, in the club's colours alone. For big matches the whole stand becomes one picture of cards, flags, smoke and giant painted sheets, and one-colour stickers and murals carry the same names, skulls and borrowed pop icons into the city.

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Use it with care

Ultras graphics belong to living, often closed supporters' groups whose banner, name and emblem stand for the group itself, so do not lift a real group's name, logo or lettering for a brand, campaign or fashion line as if it were anonymous street style. The language carries the political baggage of both extremes of 1970s street politics: Vice and Scalcione trace the 'Ultras Liberi' lettering to French and Italian far-right lettering, and some curve, such as S.S. Lazio's Ultras (1974), are known for fascist slogans, but group names such as Commando, Brigate and Fedayn were borrowed from political marches, and many 1970s ultras came from the extra-parliamentary left, Lotta Continua above all, so the same sign can mean opposite things in two curve; check what a borrowed symbol or slogan has meant in that curva before using it. Fare's guide to discriminatory practices in European football lists the SS Totenkopf skull, Sig and Odal runes, the Wolfsangel, the Celtic cross (often in place of an 'O') and the code '88' among the far-right symbols seen in stadiums on banners, stickers and shirts: never use them, and keep a borrowed skull clearly apart from the Totenkopf, as the guide does. Nazi symbols are banned by law in Germany, Austria, Poland and other countries, and UEFA fined Germany's football association after its fans showed a neo-Nazi flag at Euro 2012. Memorial displays and murals, for the 74 dead of Port Said in 2012, 72 of them Al Ahly supporters, or the Superga air crash of 1949, are acts of mourning, not decoration. In Egypt a Cairo court banned all ultras groups in May 2015 and members have been arrested since; do not attribute new work to Egyptian ultras groups or their members. Flares and smoke are dangerous and banned in many stadiums; do not present pyrotechnics as a device to imitate.

01

How it works

  • Paint the group's name, and little else, in huge squared capitals packed close together on a long cloth hung along the railing of your end of the stand; it is the group's collective signature and the line that marks its territory, so make it readable from the far side of the ground.
  • Use the club's colours and nothing else, in flat fields (white letters on red, green on white) and let thousands of scarves, flags or cards repeat them until the stand becomes one block of colour.
  • For the big match, turn the whole curva into one picture: a mosaic of cards held up by every supporter, or a single sheet painted by hand for weeks and unfurled over the crowd, carrying a two-word message, a club hero or the city's emblem, composed to be seen from the opposite stand and on television. Between choreographies, hang short message banners in the group's lettering, celebrating the club, mocking a rival with irony or provocation, or protesting against the authorities or the club itself, each shown at the moment of the match it is meant for.
  • Take emblems from wherever they serve the group, such as the city's she-wolf or bull, the club crest, a skull, an Apache warrior, Alex from A Clockwork Orange or a superhero, and use them for what they say about us against them, not for what they first meant.
  • Keep the group's name, lettering and symbols the same wherever they appear, on the banner, the flags, the stickers and the murals, as a home-made corporate identity, and carry them out of the stadium: screen-print one-colour stickers for lampposts, road signs and bus shelters, paint murals in the group's neighbourhood, and cover a rival group's mark with your own.
  • Let the group's own artists draw it and its members paint and assemble it by hand together, and sign it only with the group's name, never with a designer's.

Italy, late 1960s: organised supporters' groups in the curved end stands (curve) of football grounds, after earlier fan clubs such as Torino's Fedelissimi Granata (1951); Hajduk Split's Torcida (1950), often called Europe's oldest supporters' group, took its name from Brazil's torcidas after the 1950 World Cup rather than from an Italian model. Milan's Fossa dei Leoni followed in 1968. In 1969 Sampdoria supporters (Ultras Tito Cucchiaroni) and Torino supporters (Ultras Granata) first used 'ultras' as a group name. Banners, giant flags, drums and fireworks became standard in the 1970s. Rome's CUCS (1977) helped turn coordinated displays into a choreographic language between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and card mosaics and giant hand-painted sheets became common from the late 1980s, after forerunners such as Roma's 'Ti amo' (1983). Its emblems descend partly from heraldry: Scalcione counts coats of arms and civic emblems, such as Rome's she-wolf and Turin's bull, among the symbols a curva recovers rather than invents, and Wikipedia's 'Tifo' roots club colours and arms in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The model reached Spain from the mid-1970s (Biris Norte, 1975), more widely after the 1982 World Cup, France in the mid-1980s, Germany, Austria (Ultras Rapid, 1988) and the Balkans in the 1980s, and later North Africa, Egypt (Ultras Ahlawy, 2007), Asia, where Indonesian clubs have groups named on the Italian model (Curva Nord Persija, PSS Sleman's Brigata Curva Sud), and North American soccer

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Generous white space, Lowercase only, Pastel, Gradients, Gloss & highlights, Luxurious & glamorous, Calm & contemplative, Rational & objective

Palette

  • #c8102e
  • #f4f1ea
  • #141414
  • #f2b705
  • #1d3c8f
  • #1f7a3e

Typefaces

  • The 'Ultras Liberi' genre

    heavy, geometric, closed and squared capitals packed with tight spacing, painted by hand on cloth for decades before an anonymous designer, 'The Maccio', put a free font of that name on DaFont (first listed 1 August 2008); Vice and Scalcione trace its ancestors to French and Italian far-right lettering of the late 1960s and 1970s (Jack Marchal's Ratanegra for the GUD, the Fronte della Gioventù's Campo Hobbit lettering)

  • Set display faces enlarged and painted by hand

    Stencil on the Curva Sud Milano banner, Futura Black on Roma's Fedayn, Timepiece on Sampdoria's Ultras Tito (Scalcione), and bold Helvetica-style capitals on the CUCS banner of 1977 (AS Roma)

  • Sticker lettering drawn from Gill Kayo, Cooper, Balloon, Stencil, Black Cloister, Hansa Fraktur, Estro and Flash, mixed with irregular hand-drawn letters after Art Deco, Fascist-era signage, 1968 protest banners, psychedelic posters and comics (Avellino stickers, People's Graphic Design Archive)

  • Tifo (Romain Tronchin, 205TF, 2022; begun in 2021 in ECAL's master's in type design)

    a revival built from 1970s and 1980s tifosi fanzines in five styles, Roma (square counters), Venezia, Bologna (outline), Palermo (stencil) and Milano, keeping the 'oddities' of the vernacular sources

Known for

  • Fossa dei Leoni (AC Milan, founded 1968), often called the first full ultras group; its banner photographed in the 1972/73 season

    Scalcione, fig. 74

  • Ultras Tito Cucchiaroni (Sampdoria, 1969), the first group with Torino's Ultras Granata to take the name 'ultras'; Scalcione identifies its banner lettering as Timepiece, the mechanical capitals of the 1971 A Clockwork Orange poster

  • Commando Ultrà Curva Sud (CUCS), AS Roma

    its banner first hung on 9 January 1977 against Sampdoria, 'COMMANDO ULTRA CURVA SUD' in gargantuan white capitals on red, designed by an artist the club names as Mr Fortunato, who agreed white was clearer than yellow

  • 'Ti amo', Curva Sud, Lazio–Roma derby, 23 October 1983

    a two-word banner unfurled before kick-off 'like a cloud', its lettering, Trenta recalls, 'almost a kilometre' long, made by CUCS leader Vittorio Trenta with a group including his wife in his 70 m² flat, after the card display of the Olympic bear at Moscow 1980; listed by AS Roma among ten great derby choreographies

  • Fedayn (AS Roma, early 1970s), banner in heavy geometric capitals that Scalcione matches to Futura Black, and the Curva Sud Milano banner in Stencil

  • Avellino ultras stickers (Campania, 1978–1995; People's Graphic Design Archive, from Marco Penta's collection)

    screen-printed, mostly one colour, green on white, with soldiers, skulls, Apache figures, superheroes, the Irpinian wolf, a mohawk borrowed from a clothing brand on 'The Wild Boys' (1984) and Bob Marley for the Kaya group

  • Magic Fans (founded July 1991) and Green Angels (February 1992), AS Saint-Étienne

    the first under a skull and Alex from A Clockwork Orange, the second under the head of Cochise, waging a 'war of signs' of tags and stickers across the city, removing and over-stickering each other's marks (Ginhoux, Métropolitiques, 2015)

  • Ultras Ahlawy, Al Ahly, Cairo (first banner 13 April 2007)

    banners and pyro shows, 'Freedom for Ultras' banners with the faces of jailed members; its members were among the 72 Al Ahly supporters killed at Port Said on 1 February 2012 (74 dead in all), and the faces of the dead, most of them Ultras Ahlawy fans, were painted in the Mohamed Mahmoud Street memorial murals (see egyptian-revolution-street-art); banned with other Egyptian ultras groups in 2015 and disbanded in 2018

03

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleUltras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)1968–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & North Africa, Southeast Asia, North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Francesco Scalcione, U/Oltre. Analisi degli strumenti di comunicazione della sottocultura ultras come forma di comunicazione del disagio giovanile dagli anni '60 ad oggi, degree thesis in Design e Comunicazione, Politecnico di Torino, a.y. 2025/26 (supervisors Davide Tomatis and Davide Eucalipto), https://webthesis.biblio.polito.it/39092/ (downloaded PDF read: ultras typography as a vernacular genre, not one font, hand-painted on cloth or PVC with brushes and spray cans; the 'fasciofont' ancestry via Ordre Nouveau, Jack Marchal's Ratanegra and the Fronte della Gioventù; Stencil for Curva Sud Milano, Futura Black for the Fedayn, Timepiece for Ultras Tito; the banner as a 'collective territorial signature'; cloth painted with industrial paints, later nylon, PVC, acrylic and spray with stencils; CUCS (1977) as a pioneer of choreography; card mosaics and giant hand-painted sheets from the late 1980s; three levels of a choreography, chromatic, iconographic and textual; the she-wolf for Rome and the bull for Turin; Legia Warsaw 2017; Curva Sud Roma 'Una città una maglia', 13 April 2025; stickers and murals as territorial marking; p. 57: from the late 1970s groups use 'gli stessi caratteri e gli stessi simboli' to be recognised, a popular, vernacular 'corporate identity', which in the 1980s–90s 'figure specializzate' design and make; p. 58: the striscione becomes 'uno strumento narrativo' with 'messaggi celebrativi, ironici o provocatori', shown at chosen moments of the match; p. 59: from the 2000s it carries dissent towards public institutions and the clubs themselves, as against the 2010 tessera del tifoso; pp. 71–72: the iconographic level of 'simboli, figure, stemmi e anche miti cittadini', which the curva recovers rather than invents)
  2. Valerio Mattioli, ''Ultras Liberi', storia del fasciofont', VICE Italia, 15 October 2014, https://www.vice.com/it/article/storia-font-ultras-liberi-593/ (a geometric face used for years on banners by 'le curve di mezza Italia' and put on DaFont by an anonymous designer; descends from Marchal's Ratanegra and the Fronte della Gioventù lettering; Alessio D'Ellena places the lettering more in the tradition of the Atelier Populaire; spread across ideologically disparate settings); DaFont, 'Ultras Liberi' by The Maccio, first seen 1 August 2008, https://www.dafont.com/ultras-liberi.font
  3. People's Graphic Design Archive, 'Avellino Ultras Stickers' (c. 1980; stickers made 1978–1995; Marco Penta collection, added by Antonio Bianchino, 2023), https://peoplesgdarchive.org/item/9662/avellino-ultras-stickers (screen printing; mostly one colour, green on white, for cost; warriors, skulls, Apache figures, superheroes, aggressive animals, the Irpinian wolf; brand borrowings; Gill Kayo, Cooper, Balloon, Stencil, Black Cloister, Hansa Fraktur, Estro, Flash)
  4. Bérangère Ginhoux, 'En dehors du stade : l'inscription des supporters « ultras » dans l'espace urbain', Métropolitiques, 13 May 2015, https://metropolitiques.eu/En-dehors-du-stade-l-inscription.html (Magic Fans, July 1991, skull and Alex from A Clockwork Orange; Green Angels, February 1992, head of Cochise; stickers on lampposts, road signs, parking meters and bus shelters; 'sursticker'; tifos of plastic sheets, fabric, cardboard, scarves, balloons, confetti, torches and smoke; the movement born in Italian stadiums in the 1960s, in France from the mid-1980s)
  5. AS Roma, 'Ti amo: the story behind an iconic derby tifo', https://www.asroma.com/en/news/59984/ti-amo-the-story-behind-an-iconic-derby-tifo; AS Roma, 'On this day: the formation of CUCS and a new Curva tradition', https://www.asroma.com/en/news/60193/on-this-day-the-formation-of-cucs-and-a-new-curva-tradition; AS Roma, '10 great Roma derby choreographies', https://www.asroma.com/en/news/73917/10-great-roma-derby-choreographies
  6. Romain Tronchin, Tifo typeface, 205TF, 2022, https://www.205.tf/tifo (begun 2021 in ECAL's master's in type design; based on the lettering of banners and tifosi fanzines of the 1970s and 1980s; Roma, Venezia, Bologna, Palermo and Milano styles)
  7. dzieje.pl, 'Światowe echa oprawy kibiców Legii nt. niemieckich zbrodni podczas Powstania Warszawskiego', 3 August 2017, https://dzieje.pl/node/77734
  8. Wikipedia, 'Ultras', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras (Fedelissimi Granata 1951; Fossa dei Leoni; the name first used in 1969 by Ultras Tito Cucchiaroni and Ultras Granata; banners, giant flags, drums and fireworks standard in the 1970s; S.S. Lazio Ultras 1974 and fascist slogans; spread 'across Europe, Australia, Asia and North Africa' in the 1980s–2000s; Spanish ultraism from Italian ultraism and English hooliganism at the 1982 World Cup; Ultras Rapid Block West 1988 as Austria's first group; Torcida Split listed (Hajduk Split, 1950); its date and Brazilian link are from the 'Torcida Split' article; Indonesian groups such as Curva Nord Persija and Brigata Curva Sud (PSS Sleman); casuals avoid colours); Wikipedia (it), 'Ultras', https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras (Commandos Tigre 1967 and Fossa dei Leoni 1968; the striscione as the ultras' main means of expression; Spanish groups from Biris Norte, 1975; group names 'spesso presi in prestito dalle manifestazioni e dai cortei politici' and many 1970s ultras from the 'sinistra extraparlamentare, in particolare di Lotta Continua'; Brigate Gialloblù, Fedayn, Commando Ultrà; ideology 'quasi sempre votata all'estremismo (sia di sinistra che di destra)'; groups in Switzerland, Austria and Germany in the 1980s); Wikipedia, 'Tifo', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifo (card mosaics, hoisted painted banners, flags, smoke and flares; club colours and coats of arms rooted in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance); Wikipedia, 'Ultras Ahlawy', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras_Ahlawy; Wikipedia, 'Timbers Army', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbers_Army (the 2009 Timber Jim tifo named one of the five best in MLS history, citing MLSsoccer.com, 2011); Wikipedia, 'Torcida Split', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torcida_Split (founded 28 October 1950, 'the oldest supporters group in Europe', named after Brazilian torcidas)
  9. Wikipedia, 'Port Said Stadium riot', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Said_Stadium_riot (1 February 2012; 74 killed: 72 Al-Ahly fans, one Al-Masry fan and one police officer)
  10. Associated Press, 'Egypt court bans popular, hard-core 'ultra' soccer fan clubs', Sports Illustrated, 16 May 2015, https://www.si.com/uncategorized/2015/05/16/ap-ml-egypt-soccer-fans (Cairo's Court of Urgent Matters bans the ultras over terrorism accusations); Fanack, 'The End of the Ultras Era in Egypt', 15 July 2018, https://fanack.com/culture/features-insights/ultras-era-egypt~99823/ (groups banned by an Egyptian court in 2015; 12 ultras arrested after the March 2018 match and five more two weeks later; Ultras Ahlawy burn their flag and announce they will disband, citing 'the safety of our members')
  11. Fare network, Guide to Discriminatory Practices in European Football, version 6, June 2021, https://www.frf.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/UEFA-Fare-Manual_V6_june-2021.pdf (Celtic cross 'often used as a replacement for the letter O' on banners, signs, scarves and stickers; SS-Totenkopf skull 'one of the most commonly displayed neo-Nazi symbols'; Sig-runes, Wolfsangel and Odal-rune on stadium banners; '88' on fan shirts and in group names; 'context is of paramount importance'; skull and crossbones not to be confused with the Totenkopf; Fare observers at UEFA matches since 2013)
  12. PanARMENIAN.Net, 26 June 2012, https://www.pan.am/en/113465 (UEFA fines the German football association $31,200 for 'improper conduct' after fans displayed a neo-Nazi flag at the Euro 2012 match against Denmark on 17 June); Wikipedia, 'Bans on Nazi symbols', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_Nazi_symbols (Austria, Germany, Poland and others ban the display of Nazi symbols)

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