- Application
- Branding System
- UX/UI Design
The Fan Controlled Football League is exactly what it sounds like. Pick your team name, design your logo and jerseys, draft players, call plays, make every decision. We helped FCF bring this category-defining experience to life.
Challenge
Typically when something has never been done before, there is no luxury of reference. For the Fan Controlled Football league, confronting the familiarity and timeless convention of football proved to be just as challenging as starting with a blank canvas. As digital partners, our collective task was to help merge digital gaming technology with real life athletes to play a beloved game in an entirely new, fan-driven way.
Problems To Solve
Introduce a never-before-seen hybrid football league
Create a seamless real-time experience across multiple devices and platforms
Build an intuitive design system for a holistically new football paradigm
Visual Identity
Our first design objective was to redesign the FCF logo and establish a set of clearly documented brand guidelines. Rebellious, energetic, gritty—leading adjectives behind our exploration. To accomplish this direction, we introduced a new color palette featuring bolder, high-intensity colors to complement the brand’s original yellow and black scheme.
Guidelines
Our brand guidelines sought to balance the bright, loud, and aggressive colors that encapsulate the brand while also communicating a grungy, intense street football essence. Balancing the gaming and technology aspects of the brand was integral to our design direction and documentation.
Team Branding
When building a design system for a new sports league, a critical part of that design language is team branding. In FCF's context, fans really do call the shots, including team names and even initial logo drafts.
Our focus was to refine the winning logos into a modern, scalable identity that each fan-controlled team could be proud of and rep across jerseys and other memorabilia.
Product Approach
Discovery
In order to fully comprehend the league and system we were designing for, we began with discovery and collaboration among all key stakeholders. From founders to subject matter experts and even potential users, we collaborated across multiple channels in an effort to research, learn, and define requirements.
User Experience
In order to tap into existing UX ‘muscle memory’, we worked to design a platform that would leverage natural expectations for a sports league while still visually positioned as something completely new. By establishing user types and goals, an information architecture and user flows, we were able to arrive at high fidelity wireframes and avoid the common gaps of new digital experiences.
UX Wireframes
Mechanics
Game Week
Each week, fans have the power to draft players, engage in play-calling during the game, and make coaching/owner decisions for their team. After defining stories and requirements, we designed the user journey to facilitate this dynamic, recurring experience while helping users learn innately as they progressed through the events
The Draft
We designed a fantasy football-esque platform to participate in the draft. Leading up to the draft, we created an experience for users to research players, set their queue, and prepare for the live event. In tangent, we designed a system for fans to join in with thousands of other users to submit their votes for the player to be drafted to their team.
Live Game
The live game was meant to be fast-paced, interactive, and exciting. We set out to deliver a structure that would allow users to fully engage in the game without the technology getting in the way. Our designs were informed by existing social platforms to help users feel comfortable in the play-calling experience. Alerts and announcements would automatically appear at the right time and help guide users to make the decisions they needed to make.
Mobile Registration + Playcalling
Badges + Animations
Desktop UI
— Scalable design system to allow for expansion and growth
— High-contract over dark interface for accessibility and visibility
— Leveraged colors to help users navigate the site and categorize content
— Balanced functionality requirements with an engaging design language
Homepage
Fan Dashboard
Fan IQ + Quests
Strategic Planning
Discovery + Design Sprints
Research, Analytics, & Insights
Product Requirements
User Experience
Experience Strategy
Marketing Website
Digital Product + Services
Design Systems + Style Guides
Technology
Technical Discovery
Interactive Prototyping
NFT Experience
Ballerz Collective
As an additional fan engagement and revenue generation strategy, we collaborated with the FCF team to bring ‘Ballerz Collective’ to life—a customizable set of 20,500 unique, programmatically generated NFT avatars exclusively managed by fans in the league. Each one is created from more than 150 possible traits and gear. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, and skin are permanent, non-customizable traits that comprise the “base level” Ballerz.
User Flows
UX Wireframes
UI Prototypes
"The Brave People team has done a masterful job at capturing the essence of the energy and edginess of FCF and projecting it through their designs and UX for our site, mobile apps and branding elements. Simply put, Brave People crushes it."
Play Calls
Saw 250,000 play calls made in inaugural weekend, with 70% calling over five plays each.
Downloads
Saw dramatic increase in downloads from 735,000 in the first week to 2.1 million in the playoffs.
Series A Closed
Supported the FCF team as their primary Design partner during their successful $40m Series A.
Results
Introduced new category of hybrid sports league to gamers and sports fans alike
Developed a new logo and identity guidelines to organize FCF’s brand elements.
Developed a Design System to codify UI components across all web and native platforms.
Successfully launched Season 1.0 and 2.0 desktop, iOS, and Android experiences
Supported alternate streams of revenue generation through merchandise and NFT design
Next Project
eCommerce — Introducing Soil-To-Table