A BIke for the Pope

It’s true, we painted a bike, made a custom head badge and chain guard for Pope Francis. It was a real honour to get the call from Advance Sports International in Philadelphia. Essentially they were teaming up with the Philadelphia Cycling Coalition and the City of Philadelphia to give The Pope a bike and it had to be special. He was coming to Philly at the end of September 2015 for the World of Families Conference, the partnership was not only giving The Pope a bike, but they were presenting the city of Philadelphia with 100 bikes for organizations and for people in need of wheels.

An in-house designer from ASI did all the design work for the scheme but then the big challenge came when we had to sort all the different levels of stencils and masks. Pretty much every part of the bike had some sort of design element that required no less than 3 masks, some as many as 10. It was a super labour intensive job but of course sometimes the most simple schemes take the most work

The head badge was inspired by The Popes official coat of arms. And then the cherry on top an angle wind for the chain guard.

Now all we need is a picture of the Pope riding the bike around the halls of the Vatican.