The 2023 NFL season for the Washington Commanders provided momentum, energy, and opportunity to reconnect with the city and our fans. We crafted our season look and feel to strengthen this connection and strategically position the franchise for future growth.
The 2023 NFL season for the Washington Commanders provided momentum, energy, and opportunity to reconnect with the city and our fans. We crafted our season look and feel to strengthen this connection and strategically position the franchise for future growth.
CONCEPTS
To build upon this new-found momentum I wanted to highlight our home within our designs.
I approached our season look and feel from this baseline thought of how to better integrate our home into our brand. Throughout the offseason our fanbase had seen incredible growth of interaction and optimism toward the future. Timing was perfect to expand on our connection with our fans and city, especially given the opportunity for a new stadium site on the horizon.
When creating I take designs down multiple paths to take off the restraints and experiment to find new solutions. These paths brought in different ways to utilize elements from football and D.C. cultures. Explorations took the form of textures, architectural elements, museum pieces, the D.C. flag, movement, and more.
FOR THE DISTRICT
After diving into these different paths it was clear we were in need of assets from the city to work with. I took photographs throughout the city of different textures, architectural elements, and scenes that we could utilize within our graphics to craft those connections.
MEDIA DAY
Taking what I learned from exploration within our designs and the reconnection to our city, I began to tackle our media day set.
Media day assets set the tone for the season. The visual storyline begins to unfold and our media day needed to showcase our devotion to the city and the elements we began to create.
I began with a mood board of physical representations of elements within D.C. Handwritten pieces to reflect the constitution, rippled metal to give the illusion of water from The Reflecting Pool, and marble from our architectural elements.
Continuing down this path, we found the need to move toward a digital background to better amplify our impact for in-stadium video graphics. We began to merge the previous elements with our new digital capabilities.
Upon creating mockups, we found that the best solution to get the most out of our media day assets would be to create two sets of backgrounds. A high-energy animated background for video and a series of still sets for photo. Both sets brought in elements of D.C. architecture, textures, and handwriting while achieving a wide variety of scenes that still felt cohesive.
SEASON GRAPHICS
The final product of our season look and feel brought together all of these D.C. elements and merged them with the world of football. Throughout our look and feel you will find elements of marble, stone, columns, and grit that make up our city. In addition to the previous elements I created icons to help bolster our library of assets. This has been applied throughout our seasonal needs.
We were given the opportunity to bring our look and feel throughout the stadium with experiential graphics.
I designed the fence wraps below to cover the stadium and help add our brand personality to our space. Given the unexpectedness that comes along with the sports industry I designed with the possibility of trades taking place so the costs to replace could be kept minimal. If only one square were needed to be cut and swapped out this keeps us from the need to re-print the whole design. In addition to these features I designed large scale banners to welcome our fans on the exterior of our stadium.
