Each spring, San Francisco’s streets come alive with color and costumes as runners wind their way from the San Francisco Bay to Ocean Beach in the iconic Bay to Breakers race established in 1912. This year, race marketing got a makeover: a vibrant, wildly expressive new look courtesy of artist and longtime runner Zach Litoff ’22.
A former standout on Santa Clara’s cross country and track teams, Litoff has long embraced the iconic race’s offbeat energy and community spirit. Now, he’s helping shape its visual identity.
“The most important thing I wanted to capture and celebrate was the people of San Francisco,” Litoff explains. “San Francisco is a gorgeous and amazing city in so many ways, but what makes it so unique isn’t just the Golden Gate Bridge or the stellar architecture; it’s the people.”
Litoff’s new designs for Bay to Breakers is a chaotic, celebratory mix of abstract, angular characters. He had created over 60 unique figures to represent the city’s diversity and the race’s community. “This race is made up by everyone,” he says. “So I tried to get all parts of the city to build out the branding.”
A key influence was Henri Matisse’s paper cutouts. “That rebellious creativity felt like a perfect metaphor for Bay to Breakers. It’s a wild, crazy race built on people re-imagining what a race can be,” he says.
Like Matisse, who turned to bold, angular cutouts after losing the ability to paint, Litoff leaned into abstraction to capture the race’s spirit. “Realism couldn’t touch the energy of this race and this city,” he says. But “with abstraction and expressionism, I can capture the entire energy.”
His connection to the race is personal. Litoff first ran Bay to Breakers as a freshman at Santa Clara and has every year since. “I had never run a race like this… it’s like this moving block party,” he says.
Now his designs are splashed across race shirts, banners, and promotional materials. And they’re not just a one-time thing. While the race shirts and medals will feature new, year-specific artwork annually, Litoff says the overall rebranding will continue for multiple years, guided by the visual identity he helped establish.
For Litoff, seeing his art on display at such an iconic event is still surreal. “It means the world. Bay to Breakers is the oldest consecutively run annual footrace in the world and I left my mark on that.”
Much of Litoff’s creative mindset was formed at Santa Clara, from studio hours spent in the art department to goofy cross country team traditions with his cross-country team. He says it took him a while to embrace the absurdity of the team’s annual roster photos which regularly go viral. “I remember being mortified as a freshman when they told me about it,” he says. “I thought everyone was going to think I was weird. But all the older guys just said, ‘It doesn’t matter—just have fun with it.’”
That spirit of playfulness stuck with him. “Getting goofy with the boys taught me that I don’t have to follow ‘the rules,’” Litoff says. “That energy—of not taking yourself too seriously—is in everything I design, from Bay to Breakers posters to t-shirts. If it makes you smile and feel something, it’s working.”