ESPN
Role: Art Direction / Graphic Design
Overview
ESPN is the home for sports: it’s where millions of fans watch thousands of live events and shows, get scores, on-demand news, highlights, and expert analysis from the ESPN networks. In addition, fans engage with top-tier fantasy games, premium articles, and more. With ESPN being under the Disney brand umbrella, I’ve had the unique opportunity to help redesign the branding of the #1 March Madness experience, design fantasy pick'em games, and create celebratory moments for the ESPN app.
ESPN - App Highlights
Sports are all about celebration, right? That’s exactly why we wanted to implement intentional and recurring app highlights using a marketing tool called Braze. For this monthly campaign, we used targeted modals that greeted our fans upon opening the app. I led the design for the Heisman 2022 winner, Super Bowl LVII, NBA Draft, and the US Open.
US Open 2023
The US Open is a thrilling tennis tournament held annually in Queens, New York. As I began researching the branding for this event, it became clear that blue was the hero color, with touches of yellow being ideal for accents. These contrasting colors, along with the energy of the game, led me to choose a neon aesthetic, which was incorporated into the typography and borders. In collaboration with our Motion team, I led the design of dynamic and glitchy motion graphics, embracing my love for all things electric.
NBA Draft 2023
The NBA Draft is an annual event where teams select players who have not previously played in the NBA. To celebrate this occasion, we wanted to create a unique tribute for every player drafted in the first round. This was a tall order because we needed to account for all 122 players who might be drafted. To accomplish this, I teamed up with our incredible Motion Designers and utilized the magic of Figma components and our custom internal After Effects templates. These templates used our ESPN.com API, which returned the colors, text, and player names, to generate a unique export for each drafted player.
Tournament Challenge - Brand Redesign
Tournament Challenge is the #1 bracket app for the NCAA Men’s and Women’s College Basketball tournaments. The game allows you to compete against friends, ESPN personalities, and celebrities to see who finishes with the best bracket. The app is completely free to play, offering over $350K in total prizes across all four bracket games.
Brief & Original Branding
This redesign focused on several key design elements to elevate the brand. Modernization was a core aspect, evident in a new logo featuring a custom typeface and a refined design system for color representation. I collaborated with my design partner-in-crime, Chandler Brunelli, in addition to partners across Disney & ESPN. This was a true team effort and an amazing moment of collaboration across multiple teams.
Logo & Color Explorations - Authentic, Bold & Fun.
Achieving parity between the men's and women's versions of the game was crucial, which involved transitioning from a generic Tournament Challenge (TC) logo to definitive colors and giving equal brand weight to both versions. The need for gender parity arose because the Men’s game was developed long before the Women’s. As a team, we agreed to conduct a broad exploration of color. We created three groups for these explorations: Authentic, Bold, & Fun.
Logo Redesign
We aimed for a timeless yet modern feel, drawing on the history of Tournament Challenge and March Madness while maintaining a refined, industry-leading position. A custom typeface for the logo was developed to establish a curated look that felt inviting and fun. We chose orange as the core color for our logo, with the men’s and women’s versions each featuring their own unique additional color.
Hand-made Textures & Patterns
With our new logo sporting a modern and slightly retro aesthetic, we wanted the brand elements and backgrounds to provide a natural contrast. As we began creating backgrounds, we found ourselves drawn to halftone textures. Inspired by this, I wondered, 'What if we could create our OWN?' This sparked the idea of using physical basketballs and basketball nets, which we dipped in black acrylic paint to create handmade textures. We then digitized these large swatches to create a robust pattern library. The textures were split into three groups: one inspired by basketballs, another by nets, and the last by the action on the court. I was thrilled with the result, feeling that this approach effectively captured the energy and tactile nature of the game itself.
Grip Points
These textures are comprised of the grip points (surface dots) that give the basketball its iconic look.
Nylon Net
These textures focus on the signature diamond shape of the basketball net and the tradition of the champion team cutting off the net.
Courtside
These textures capture the energy found only on the court itself and are a combination of basketball and net prints.
Icons
After our initial textures were created, I wanted to expand our brand library to also include custom icons: x’s, o’s, arrows, basketballs, and even a variation of our TC icon.
Brand Guidelines
What’s the best part about completing a rebrand? That’s right: BRAND GUIDELINES, y’all! Creating this guide was incredibly exciting as I was able to collaborate with our Content and Motion Design teams to establish rules about our brand voice and how our designs should come alive via motion. We were able to successfully hand this over to ESPN's broadcast and marketing teams to assist as promotional materials were being created.
ESPN Fantasy- English Soccer Pick’em
ESPN Fantasy Pick'ems is a game where you predict the outcomes of real sports events to earn points. It offers a fun way to compete against others by making accurate predictions about games like football, basketball, and more. In the English Soccer Pick'em, I was inspired to create a background that embodied the soccer field. Black and white accent elements, along with circular/warped text shouting 'Goal!', were strategically used to provide a natural contrast. A custom logo was also created for use across web and app designs.
