The expanded College Football Playoff, now a 12-team tournament, presented a significant challenge: helping viewers navigate its complex structure. ESPN's solution involved six months of planning, thousands of rendering hours, and a massive collaboration between internal creative teams and external partners, resulting in a completely new visual system for broadcasts across ESPN and TNT Sports.
This redesigned graphics package dramatically departs from ESPN's existing college football aesthetic and past CFP branding. It features bright motifs, premium textures, and striking glass elements to enhance the presentation while clearly explaining the new format. The campaign theme, “there’s never been a playoff like this,” perfectly captures the expanded tournament and ESPN's innovative approach.
“We have a whole new 12-team bracket experience. It’s a completely new fan experience,” said Marissa Dempsey, senior manager, creative strategy and integration, ESPN Creative Studio. “Part of the strategy is really understanding what that means, what the education strategy is for the fan as it relates to the overall creative strategy for the brand.”
Early summer planning allowed for the creation of educational elements explaining the new bracket, integrated into summer programming before the playoff began. This preemptive education aimed to boost excitement and comprehension for viewers. The ESPN Creative Studio led the creative development, ensuring a cohesive messaging strategy across all platforms.
“Within that creative strategy process, we partner with all teams across the business. That’s our marketing team, programming, content, digital, et cetera,” said Dempsey. “We capture all the brand goals and work together to ensure a cohesive messaging plan.”
“Throughout this creative strategy process… it really allows us to sort of have those opportunities to ideate around new ways of thinking, creative innovations, and even creative work streams in the team,” added Dempsey.
The design centers around a "living gridiron" concept, utilizing interactive field lines and dynamic motion derived from real gameplay. Combined with premium textures and glass effects, these elements create a sense of depth and energy. “We’re trying to balance the intensity, the tension, the excitement of playoff football, but also, this is essentially its season finale,” said Brian Girardin, art director, ESPN Creative Studio. “So, we wanted to bring in the premium texturing… very sleek, polished look.”
The brighter aesthetic is a departure from previous, darker packages. “Last time, it was dark, and you had those pops of team color. We have a lot of packages at ESPN that are darker, cinematic, a bit moody,” explained Girardin. “How do we not go down that road even though we do love it? How do we make this one bright and a celebration? But it also has to read football.”
A new logo system was created to handle the expanded format and multi-network broadcast needs. “The CFP has its own brand identity, and we worked with them to create a logo system structured around how we need to use it,” Girardin said. “There’s a million shows and different titlings that need to be accomplished in the logo system.”
This system is more flexible than previous versions, moving beyond the previous reliance on a single shield logo. “Our logo system previous to that was everything kind of in that shield and that was the only place that existed,” said Girardin. “This time around, we wanted to have a broader approach that could more easily communicate the titles and all the brand language in multiple spots, whether it’s on promotional elements, in-game, web banners.”
The CFP football icon is central, appearing in 3D versions that transform into graphic elements. “The football comes up, cascades out, and sort of reveals the scoreboard. The shapes and the way things are laid out are a reflection of that football icon, which is universal to both networks and signature to CFP alone,” Girardin explained. The dynamic motion is partially derived from real game footage.
“The motion and the splits are orchestrated like field lines and how the action can change those,” said Girardin. “Some of that motion is defined by piping through actual play motion to get that partially chaotic but orchestrated motion naturally into some 3D animation.”
The fluted glass elements, featured in the logo and as a 3D football, add to the dynamic background. The typefaces, Nordt and Shapiro, ensure readability while maintaining a premium aesthetic. Tendril created the brand film, while Two Fresh handled the edit toolkit and marketing assets.
Cinema 4D's Redshift and Octane were used for rendering. The trophy animations proved the most challenging to render. The package will be used consistently across both ESPN and TNT broadcasts, maintaining a unified look but with each network retaining their individual pre- and post-game coverage. ESPN handles game production. A new score bug with animation reflects the overall design.
The insert graphics vary by playoff round: silver for early rounds and gold for the semifinals and championship, further enhancing visual distinction. The new package is part of ESPN’s larger college football coverage refresh, with additional elements planned for the 2025 regular season and "College GameDay."