Fieldwork — Commonwealth Games Wales
Stick a
Dragon on It
A live brief from Commonwealth Games Wales — designing a pin badge for Team Wales at the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.
Fieldwork — Commonwealth Games Wales
A live brief from Commonwealth Games Wales — designing a pin badge for Team Wales at the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.
Real client, real constraints, real stakes. Commonwealth Games Wales needed a pin badge representing Team Wales at Glasgow 2026 — one of the small, tradable symbols athletes exchange with 73 other nations. Working as part of a five-person team, this meant finding a way into Welsh identity that went deeper than the obvious, then proving it could actually be made.
The Problem
Every obvious route into "Welsh" design — dragons, sheep, leeks, daffodils — was already sitting on the table before research even started. The brief itself flagged it: stand out from 73 other nations without falling back on tourist-shop shorthand.
Auditing past Commonwealth Games badges made the risk concrete — visually Welsh, but flat and forgettable up close. The challenge was digging into language, poetry, industry, and folklore deep enough to say something real, while still reading as instantly Welsh from across a room.
This wasn't a concept exercise — Team Wales needed roughly 15,000 units, durable enough to be worn and traded for years, and produceable through a real manufacturing process, not just a pretty render.
The Thinking
Research ran wide before it ran deep: language, food, work, festivals, sport, and folklore, gathered as a team and cross-checked against family interviews on what being Welsh actually feels like day to day — pride, humour, landscape, community, and resilience came up again and again, rarely dragons.
That fed into a symbolism review that deliberately interrogated the obvious choice first. The dragon wasn't discarded, but reconsidered — reworked through the visual language of Celtic knotwork and traditional love-spoon carving rather than dropped in as a stock silhouette. Alongside it: Awen, the Celtic symbol for language and creative spirit; the Mari Lwyd's role in cross-cultural exchange, a fitting parallel for a badge designed to spark conversation between athletes from different nations; and Wales's industrial history in steel and mining as a counterweight to the softer cultural references.
Material choices followed the same logic. Welsh sessile oak — used in traditional love-spoon carving for centuries — became the anchor material, engraved rather than printed to keep the tactile, handmade quality the brief called for.
The Work
Sketching & Symbolism Development
Concept sketches came from every team member independently — dragon motifs coiled into Celtic-knot forms, love-spoon-inspired silhouettes, flag-colour explorations, shield and crest shapes benchmarked against traditional Welsh heraldry. Two directions stood out and were developed in parallel: one closer to a traditional, engraved crest; the other a cleaner, more contemporary logo-mark.
Prototyping & Manufacturing
The traditional route moved into CAD, then physical testing: laser-cut prototypes in card and wood to check readability at actual pin-badge scale, and 3D-printed trial runs to test how the raised elements would sit and read in the hand — alongside a full technical drawing to prove the design could hold up on a production line.
The Resolved Design
Tutor feedback on an early two-material version — oak with a separate steel overlay — was that the layered materials read as busy rather than premium. Cutting it back to a single engraved oak surface sharpened the whole design: the dragon's tail winding through the Awen symbol, framed by a shield silhouette nodding to Welsh heraldry, finished with "Cymru," "Glasgow," and "2026" carried in the engraved banding.
The Result
There's no medal for this one — Commonwealth Games Wales never confirmed which design went into production. But the brief was never really about winning a competition; it was about proving a design could hold up under real constraints: recognisably Welsh at a glance, meaningful under scrutiny, and manufacturable at a scale of 15,000 units without losing what made it worth wearing. The final oak badge does all three — a single material, cleanly engraved, carrying centuries of craft reference in a form built for a production line.
The brief closed with a live pitch to Commonwealth Games Wales, presenting the full process from research through to the resolved design — the same research-to-outcome throughline shown here.