David Lewis caught himself as he walked out on the City Ground pitch at half-time on Sunday.
He put his hands to his mouth, clutched his heart and mouthed “thanks” as the crowd stood to applaud the man who had designed Nottingham Forest’s iconic crest 50 years ago. “Wow,” he said, with a hint of emotion in his voice. “Wow, blimey. Crazy. Ridiculous.”
When Lewis entered a competition in the Nottingham Evening Post in March 1973 to come up with a new badge for the Reds, he wanted to create something which “belonged” to the club’s supporters. The reaction he received at the weekend, midway through the clash with Manchester United, as the crowd acknowledged his contribution to Forest’s history suggests he achieved his goal.
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Lewis can’t remember what he did with the £25 he received for being picked as the winner from more than 800 entries. But the “little kick” he gets from seeing his design all over the world and in so many different circumstances - from a holiday in Mexico to Glastonbury - far outweighs the prize money.
“The idea of endurance or longevity is not something you think about,” Lewis tells NottinghamshireLive. “Within just a few years of it being designed, Brian Clough and Peter Taylor came to the club, then within a decade there had been huge success and the badge had been promoted across Europe. That probably helped to cement it with supporters, because it becomes associated with the success.
“I was gobsmacked to see a Forest flag with the badge on waving on the last night at Glastonbury. Forgive the pun, but amongst the forest of extending poles with flags on, every year for quite a few years, on the last night on the Pyramid Stage, I saw the Forest flag amongst the others.
“That was a ‘ooh’ moment. But the story behind that is the person with it had come from Australia each year with the flag!
“As a designer, you do things, pass them on and that’s it, really. But it still gives you a little bit of a kick when you see something like that.”
Lewis goes into such detail when describing how the crest developed that the level of thought and consideration which went into it is astonishing. And yet the end result was something so beautifully simplistic.
As Four Four Two wrote when rating the badge top of the 92 clubs: “The tree, the font, the funkiness – archetypal in its simplicity, Forest’s crest is stunning proof that sometimes less is more. There’s a reason it’s barely been altered since its debut almost half a century ago. Art.”
Lewis’ final version, the one which has endured to this day - save for the addition of those two stars - was different to the one which won the Post’s competition. His original design, he says, somewhat harshly, is a “bit embarrassing”. But once he had been declared winner, he worked with the club, including club secretary at the time Ken Smales, to refine the image.
“A football club is an emotional body. It’s not like your local manufacturer of pallets or something like that,” says Lewis, who was working as a graphic designer and lecturer at Nottingham’s College of Art at the time of the competition and had a background in calligraphy.
“A club called Forest, that had to be included somehow. That led me to think, it has to be Sherwood Forest, Major Oak and all of that. But then the location of the City Ground, on the banks of the Trent, you can’t ignore that.
“These were the godsent things for a designer, having some elements to work with. I just messed around with those elements until I ended up with something which I started to think becomes an emblem.
“I found an odd link between the idea of a football club and the standard bearers for medieval knights. You are sort of in battle, people have to quickly identify something so they know where they should be.
“I started to see it in those terms. Once I’d got the idea, the river flows, a tree grows, then the mixture of something horizontal going through… this is real anorak’s stuff, isn’t it? You’ve got the flow through and then the vertical, both are positive movements in design terms.
“If you want people to get behind a badge or a symbol, you don’t want something which is soggy or going downward. Symbolically, these elements are quite important - or they were to me.
“I just kept working on that until I arrived at the thing which actually won the competition in the Post. I have to say, when I look at it now, it’s a bit embarrassing.
“I didn’t think it was a winner, but I did think it was a decent idea. I just thought it was quite a nice idea. I knew I wanted to work on it, if it was going to be chosen, to get it into something more finalised.
“When I won, the Post introduced me to the club and Ken Smales. We quickly agreed that we’d take the idea and I would work with the club to develop it. So I earned a little bit more than the Post’s 25 quid!
“The tree in the one which actually won the competition is almost like a lollipop, it’s rounded. The word Forest underneath was all capitals, with no little ‘e’. The distinctive thing on the first design was an ‘o’ which was absolutely circular. Once I’d got the time to work with the club, it very quickly changed.”
So about that lowercase “e”... “Everybody points it out,” Lewis grins. “Before I became a designer/typographer, I was trained as a calligrapher and illuminator. In the traditions of calligraphy, that’s not so unusual.
“And then having decided the word ‘Forest’ needed to be there - because that’s how people refer to the club - I wanted something that might allow supporters to grasp onto something, something which would be theirs. If now, after 50 blinkin years - good God, that’s frightening - the biggest compliment I could ever have is if the supporters own it, rather than me or the club.
“Once I’d decided to include that, I felt, if you’ve got the badge on top and the word Forest underneath, the word Forest needed to be distinctive and individual. So how could I do it?
“The original idea had a very round ‘o’. I then got on to the more condensed letters, which seemed to have a bit more solidity and link to the badge. It so happened that the lower case ‘e’ does fit in between the ‘R’ and the ‘S’ rather than a straight ‘E’. Also, I wanted it to be a bit more personal; a bit less like a company and more like a football club. So then came the ‘e’.
“It’s a unique Forest then, rather than anybody’s Forest. And then wrapping the tail of the ‘r’ around it was almost like an affectionate thing. It was something which was more personal. That was the idea, to make things more personal, more unique, more like it’s our Forest, not just the word ‘Forest’.”
The finished design was very different to the old crest. Lewis recalls there was a “mixed” reaction when his was unveiled, but with Brian Clough soon sprinkling his magic over the club it quickly became associated with the success which followed.
“The two stars work quite well on it,” Lewis smiles. “I’ve seen a version where they were put underneath, and it doesn’t work. But above, it’s quite dignified. It’s nice!
“They are still rare things. Even now, some of the big clubs still haven’t actually got that.”
Did he think all these years later Forest would be celebrating a half-century of the crest?
“When you design things, like if you design a symbol for a company, your real concern at the time is whether it will work,” Lewis replies. “In this case, it was whether it would work for the club and whether it would work for the supporters. That was my only concern, really.”
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