NBC Olympics VP Creative David Barton Dives into Milano-Cortina 2026 Graphics Package, Now You Know' Animations

One big challenge was to depict the character of each of very different and widely dispersed locations

When NBC Olympics VP of Creative David Barton and his team began developing the graphics package for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, they knew almost immediately that this assignment would present challenges unlike anything they had tackled before. Fresh off the triumphant visual storytelling of Paris 2024, the team had to pivot from a Games defined by a single iconic city to one sprawling across dramatically different locations - from the sleek, fashion-forward streets of Milan to the rugged alpine beauty of Cortina d'Ampezzo.

NBC Olympics' creative team developed series of Now You Know animations designed to bring winter sports to life for casual viewers.

The result is a graphics package that had to work as hard geographically as it did aesthetically, honoring the distinct culture, texture, and identity of each venue cluster while maintaining the visual cohesion NBC's Olympic coverage demands. Building it required drone shoots across Northern Italy, a dedicated feature shoot bringing top U.S. athletes to Hollywood, a globally distributed team of designers, and months of research and collaboration with both the organizing committee and Olympic Broadcasting Services.

SVG sat down with Barton at NBC's Stamford, CT broadcast center, to walk through the creative process behind the package, the logistical operation supporting it, and the inventive Now You Know animation series designed to bring winter sports to life for casual viewers.

How were you looking to build on your work for Paris 2024, and what were some key differences in building a package for Milan Cortina 2026?

When we started getting into the package, we were still riding high off the beauty of Paris and that amazing experience. As we [shifted] to the Winter Olympics, we wanted to return to this notion of bringing American viewers to a beautiful European locale and allowing them to experience that place for themselves. However, we quickly found out that it was going to be a bit more complicated than Paris.

When we first went to visit the organizing committee in Milan, they explained to us just how spread out the Games were going to be. From a graphic standpoint, we needed to make sure that we were honoring each of those distinct locations; in Paris, everything was pretty much in one city.

Our challenge was to create a graphics package that combined the rustic, quiet beauty of the Dolomites and Cortina with the sleek, modern design and beauty of Milan. Of course, motion logic, framing, and structure is consistent across the package, but it needed to be textured and detailed to respect each area.

Have you ever dealt with this issue before?

No, not to this extent at least. We've always had at least a central hub city, but only a few sports are happening in Milan, and everything else is being hosted [in other locations].

It's truly spread out everywhere. When you go up to Cortina, you're almost at the Austrian border. It's a totally different culture, and even the language sounds very different from the Italian spoken in Milan. While they all share the overall Italian culture, each [venue cluster] is unique.

When did you start development on the graphics package for Milan Cortina 2026?

We took a beat after Paris and started to get going in January 2025. We did a specialty-drone shoot in Cortina and Milan. We went to the Duomo di Milano, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and some other [iconic landmarks in Milan]. We also shot some storylines for bumpers: things like a family eating a meal in Milan, a Ferrari driving through the streets near Lake Como, and kids from a Cortina ski school going down the mountain. We used those bits to craft little storylines to weave in and out of the Games.

That's what started our whole exploration, and then we did about a month of research with our whole team to craft the look. We brought the thought process from the organizing committee and our own experiences back and created the look based on that. Then we started to build elements out from there.

What did your operations look like for building a package of this size?

We had a similar strategy to Paris, where we had a mix of staff and dedicated freelancers - five or six people - exclusively working on the project. And we have freelance artists from Brazil, Germany, Mexico, and Nova Scotia working on custom elements as well.

How do you coordinate with OBS to ensure a seamless workflow with its operation?

They are great partners, and we always stay in touch with each other [between Olympics]. There's almost a triangulated approach: the organizing committee is crafting the look of the Games and the field of play and informing OBS so that they can build out the overall [host-feed] graphics package. Then both are coming to us with insight into how we can build our package.

For example, we've built the system where, [when] you identify what location you're at, everything changes color. OBS is aware of that and will give us updates on what they're doing to make sure we're all aligned.

We also do a custom Figure Skating scorebug in our own look, but we make sure it looks like the rest of the world feed so it will feel seamless to the rest of the presentation.

What about the insert package? What were some key factors in how you designed those elements?

The biggest challenge of the Winter Olympics is that almost everybody is wearing glasses, helmets, and coverings, so it's a big priority for us to get athlete imagery front and center. Every single shell that we have, from lower thirds to full screens, there's always a priority to make the athlete imagery as prominent as possible.

We've also done some new custom inserts that have funny mini Fatheads, a full ac

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/20/nbc-olympics-vp-creative-david-...
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