As part of my role as a student graphic designer with Notre Dame Athletics' Fighting Irish Media, I was tasked with creating "gameday" style graphics for our defending National Championship fencing team. After talking with the athletic department and the competing athletes, my goal was to create visuals that accomplished three goals: inform and excite fans, fuel athletes’ drive, and elevate their sport. My first step was to take inventory of the assets I had to work with.
The graphics above were created using the University of Notre Dame Athletics permanent brand guidelines as well as the season "All Fight" library. These assets gave me my direction as to what the mood of my final graphic may look like. From these, I went to my mood board to lay out all my ideas:
In this brainstorm, I looked at both our in-house standard for athletics graphics as well as what is working for our opponents and other brands in our industry. I made note of elements that I loved and ideas that they inspired to spur me through my own ideation. Based on these moodboards, I created a first draft of my graphic below:
After meeting with my manger and mentor, we took the skeleton of this graphic and refined it. We wanted to make it snappier and turn the theme "Notre Dame Gold". I separated the graphics to make each day have its own graphic, reflecting who fans could look forward to following that day. I also added more informational elements as well as team specific assets. These adjustments produced the final graphics pictured below.
