Refresh the company’s existing brand, and establish a stronger visual identity to be used on marketing initiatives, company website, and products.
Goals:
Without the benefit of existing company mission and values, we needed a basis of information to proceed from. We chose to use detailed research to fill that gap. Along with the rest of the visual design team, I implemented a rigorous competitive analysis process in order to establish the existing brand presence of Genius Sports and where it was positioned amongst its competitors:
Understanding our position allowed us to compare ourselves to top-rated competitors, and gave us concrete goals to enhance our visual identity. Our findings were put together with our proposed branding assets into a presentation (below) for executive stakeholders to understand how the new assets reached our goals and enhanced the brand.
After competitive analysis, we created mood boards encompassing such aspects of branding as typography, iconography and sports imagery treatments. We held a workshop to compare these mood boards against the goals established in our competitive analysis, and identified trends that we felt would be most appropriate for Genius Sports. Based on consensus in our mood board exercise, we created a set of style tiles which encompassed our discussions and insights. Style tiles were both evaluated by the UX department and executive-level stakeholders and, after some suggestions and editing, agreed upon. Our first branding implementation of all elements together would be the new corporate website.
Executive-level stakeholders clearly stated that logo could not be changed entirely; however we were given permission to clean the existing logo up and enhance color and brand guide to better suit the needs of the organization. Therefore, we used our existing color palette as a base, and brightened the primary and secondary colors for a more accessible and energetic presence. Colors also needed to be decided on with respect to Material framework, as any new products would be built with Material-UI. Logo typography was updated to Gibson font for readability, contrast, and to match the curvature of the existing globe mark. The globe mark was also enhanced for symmetry and shadows consistent with an implied light source.
We were given an aggressive deadline of 2 months to re-design, develop and launch the new corporate website. The reason for this was that stakeholders were to attend a prestigious conference in Las Vegas, NV called Global Gaming Expo (G2E), and determined that this would be the most impactful place to unveil a refreshed brand.
In order to meet the deadline, we agreed that the MVP of the website should make use of standardized responsive page templates for page types to ease development and design time. Custom pages were implemented only for pages like the homepage and contact as these pages would be extremely high traffic. The marketing department served as owner and stakeholder of the website, and provided all the content, copy and photography that we were permitted to use. We developed a unique photography treatment to alleviate the varying levels of photography quality and style, and breathed focus and professionalism into the content by employing the use of generous negative space and hierarchy.
Our rigorous design process provided valuable insight into the sports data market visual space, in both the U.S. and overseas. Our final brand presentation was met with enthusiasm and excitement, which is most likely what led to the accelerated website deadline! Over the following year after we completed this process, we continued to implement the new brand for marketing and UI design alike, and our choices successfully provided the building blocks of designs that were unique, accessible and energetic.
Where the website design was concerned, we could have designed with CMS elements in mind more in order to both ship the website AND allow for future enhancement phases. As time went on, design and development resources continued to be tied down by frequent marketing requests for updates and changes, which could have been simply alleviated with a CMS. We also could have better advocated for a more optimized SEO strategy for the website in future enhancements.
