Inside the NHL on ESPN Graphics Package: How a Brand-New Identity Came To Be in Just Six Months The package is built for both linear and digital platforms By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Friday, October 29, 2021 - 3:21 pm
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With the return of the iconic NHL on ESPN theme song, U.S. hockey fans knew what this new iteration of the NHL on ESPN sounds like. What it looks like, however, is a very different story. The ESPN Creative Studio team was tasked with the monumental undertaking of creating a fresh identity for the new rights package that could serve both ESPN's linear and digital platforms. And it had to be done in less than six months.
We knew we had a massive amount of work ahead of us and a very short timeframe to create [the graphics package] in a way that could be adapted to the needs of all of the different areas of the company, says Tim O'Shaughnessy, creative director, visual storytelling, ESPN. The music was obviously an influential theme and was good to build on from a design standpoint, but we were truly developing our own path visually.
Balancing Act: Future Fan,' New Tech, History of the Game From the get-go, the ESPN Creative Studio team aimed to create a graphics package appealing to a younger demographic and leveraging new technologies - player tracking, AR, real-time stats - while also remaining true to the history and legacy of the game.
One key for us was designing for the future fan, not just for the existing fan, says O'Shaughnessy. The goal was to be authentic to the current hockey fan so they would be interested but also to have enough energy and motivation so that new fans would feel a relationship with the visual language.
After the rights deal was announced in March, O'Shaughnessy and company began creative development in April with the goal of combining the authenticity of legends past with the elegance of the modern game. The team began designing the full insert package and scorebug in May and then, in June, started on the animations package in partnership with Elastic and began to finalize the type of language used.
We knew we wanted to celebrate some of the wonderful and unique aspects of hockey and also really highlight team identities, says O'Shaughnessy. We wanted to lean into authenticity, but we didn't want it to feel old-timey. We wanted high impact, energy, and intensity for younger fans but also wanted to serve the [more traditional] fan. We didn't want to become an ice clich , but you also can't avoid this amazing texture with ice in hockey. There was a lot of give and take, and everything evolved over time.
The ESPN Creative Studio built the package primarily using Maxon's Cinema 4D software suite and leveraging both Octane and Redshift for rendering. The team also relied heavily on Adobe After Effects VFX and motion-graphics software. The majority of the team, including nearly all artists, worked remotely from home - as has been the case since early in the pandemic.
In the end, the graphics team was still making tweaks and delivering elements until the day of ESPN's first NHL broadcast, Oct. 12. Despite the short timeline, the ESPN Creative Studio team delivered the wholly new package on schedule.
We have some hardcore hockey fans and [recreational] hockey players on the creative team - some of our best creative visionaries - who had a lot of ideas, says O'Shaughnessy. A big part of the process was tapping into the group think and seeing what the team thought. With a new venture came a great opportunity to hear what everyone else had to say and let people take on more creative responsibility.
The OTT Factor: Serving Both ESPN and ESPN ESPN's NHL media-rights deal is among the most ambitious in history in terms of the OTT/streaming component. A whopping 75 national regular-season games per season will be streamed exclusively on both ESPN and Hulu - the most exclusive streamed games of any major U.S. sports league. With that in mind, ESPN's Creative Studio set out to create a graphics package that could serve both ESPN linear and streaming platforms equally.
Whenever you're talking about [creating graphics for] multiple screens, you have two main challenges, says O'Shaughnessy. The first is the age-old challenge of size, scale, legibility, and impact, and you solve for that simply by testing as much as possible on every device possible. But the second, and probably more challenging, is brand integration; we didn't want to be just tacking on logos everywhere depending on which [platform the game] was on. We needed it to be more seamless than that.
ESPN was able to build a future-proof design system with a universally adaptable branding language for use across all linear and direct-to-consumer platforms. This way, the system seamlessly can funnel either the ESPN or ESPN brand into the graphics elements.
It's essentially a double delivery, notes O'Shaughnessy, but the way we built it was very compartmentalized. You'll see that there's not a lot of big rendered 3D show logos. You're not going to see a big rotating ESPN or ESPN logo; instead, you're going to see a bunch of interesting, heavy 3D animation with a 2D logo on top of it. That was intentional because it streamlines [the workflow]. We can brand independently on top of those dynamic 3D animations in a fluid 2D manner.
The Scorebug: The Axis on Which the Package Spins Every great graphics package must have a great clock-and-scorebug graphic, and the NHL on ESPN package does. During early development, Art Director Kynna Randall led an exhaustive audit of scorebugs currently used in the industry to evaluate size, structure, and ways to convey information. After that, the team produced several iterations of the sc
