ESPN dedicated nearly two years to completely overhauling its college football graphics, crafting a visual identity seamlessly integrated across traditional television, streaming platforms, social media, and marketing campaigns. This project wasn't just a visual refresh for ESPN; it served as a test of improved cross-team collaboration between creative, production, and digital teams under its ESPN Creative Studio. The approach treated college football as a holistic brand experience, not just a broadcast, prioritizing consistency across all distribution platforms, studio shows, and marketing materials. “We’ve completed nearly a two-year journey, really re-imagining what college football looks and feels like across all the ESPN networks, ending in probably one of the most ambitious rebrands we’ve taken on,” said Marissa Dempsey, director, creative strategy & integration, ESPN Creative Studio.

Dempsey described the process as a “first-of-its-kind approach” at ESPN, starting with brand positioning and logos and extending to on-air elements. “In the past, branding work often happened in silos,” Dempsey said. “This time, we built a company-wide process that included executives from every team. The goal was to think holistically about how the brand lives across platforms.” This rebrand was perfectly timed with ESPN's direct-to-consumer platform launch, presenting new avenues to engage fans while acknowledging diverse access points. “It was a company-wide effort, not only to reimagine how college football appears across every product and what that brand looks like, but how we really start to elevate and integrate the ESPN brand itself more prominently,” Dempsey explained.

Joe Lauria, senior creative producer, oversaw production across ESPN's expanded ecosystem, encompassing 136 FBS teams needing individual animations while offering flexibility for FCS and high school teams. “At first glance, it’s a little bit daunting. The scale of this project, it’s just massive,” Lauria said. “The challenge was really building a system that works for every single scenario and the wide scope of how we deliver college football to our fans.” The system had to function flawlessly on traditional TV, digital YouTube shows, social media, and ESPN's direct-to-consumer service. “A lot of factors to think about when we were planning and executing this whole thing. And it’s just been a massive success for our team,” Lauria noted. The new design even extends to a refreshed “College GameDay.”

The new visual identity uses stadium atmosphere as a central design theme. “Our mission was to be bold, colorful, energetic, and fun,” said Brian Girardin, art director, ESPN Creative Studio. “We wanted to embrace the spirit of college football rather than take an overly serious approach.” The college football shield logo incorporates notches signifying crowd sections, uprights, end zones, and field lines, creating what Girardin, who led design, described as “loose terms of our sort of north stars encapsulating the stadium within the college football shield.”

This stadium concept permeates the animation package; all elements reside within a stadium designed to “activate and energize that environment and flood team color through it with typography, team logos, team color and make everything vibrant.” The rebrand deliberately shifted from the cinematic style of ESPN’s previous college football package. “That was an awesome look,” Girardin said. “But we wanted to purposely diverge from how moody and intense that was.” The team adopted a mission statement: “bold, colorful, energetic and fun.” “Make it really encapsulate the college football atmosphere from fans to game to just fandom as a whole. Let’s have fun. Let’s have color,” said Girardin.

The design incorporates unexpected elements, like animated hands manipulating design components. “We wanted to have a little bit of that fourth wall breaking aspect to things where some of those moments are a little unexpected and you wouldn’t necessarily think of two hands kicking a paper football for a matchup in a football game,” Girardin said. “It’s like, why not? It’s fun.” The new scoreboard design builds on ESPN’s “blitz towers” concept, initially used in the 2023 “Monday Night Football” redesign and later in “SEC on ABC” and College Football Playoff coverage. “The CFB scoreboard is essentially the best of both worlds in terms of what we learned from the ‘SEC on ABC’ scoreboard and what we learned post that for CFP,” Girardin explained. The scoreboard remains consistently on-screen, displaying score, down, distance, and time information during most game situations. Side panels display extra content without obscuring the main scoreboard. “The sole intent is to keep that thing up as often as possible and find ways to storytell around that in ways that utilize the left and right side of the screen,” Girardin said. The design reflects ESPN’s improved use of screen space. “It took us 15 years after the HD transition, but we were all finally comfortable using all of the 16:9 frame and not the 4:3 safe zone,” Girardin joked. “There’s a ton of room on the left and right side, and I think this look is a good utilization of that space to be eye-catching, but not overly intrusive on screen.” Even touchdown celebrations maintain scoreboard visibility. “Even through touchdowns where we’ll slide left or right and do what we refer to as sort of like a micro score. You just slide it over, do the touchdown animation and bring it back in… keeping those consistent elements on screen,” Girardin explained.

The rebrand showcases ESPN’s move towards treating creative projects as complete brand ecosystems, not just isolated graphics packages. Marketing materials were created alongside the broadcast package for consistent branding. “In the past, we’ve kind of worked in silos alongside each other with the marketing teams,” Dempsey said. “But now we’re all one creative studio team. So we’ve had a lot of success and cohesion by creating intentional marketing packages during the design phases when we’re working with our partner agency. So everything looks cohesive.” The process benefited from lessons learned during the College Football Playoff rebrand. “The first time we started to do this was with CFP where we’re developing a toolkit for marketing alongside the event rebrand,” Girardin said. “Now we sort of know each other’s toolbox a little bit more. We could all learn from each other as the process goes, because I’m sure they’re doing things that we could also be influenced by.” The rebrand includes network-specific variations, such as a blue shield for ACC Network games. “College GameDay” presented unique challenges, needing a specialized approach that incorporated new elements while preserving its established visual identity. The “GameDay” package uses a “center stage” concept, positioning the show as “the epicenter of the college football world” and “the hub of the college football world.”

This approach recognizes “GameDay’s” unique place in college football culture – it’s not merely another broadcast, but a weekly cultural event drawing thousands of fans to campuses. “It’s tough to redo ‘GameDay.’ It’s hard to picture it without orange, without like, how do you do ‘GameDay’ without signs? You can’t do a 180 degree on it and still have it feel like the same,” Girardin explained, emphasizing the balance needed when updating such a well-established brand. The design embraces what makes “GameDay” distinctive instead of radically changing it. The package incorporates a “multi-layered environment that captures the spirit of the crowd,” creating “that sort of magnetic atmosphere where it’s the game day shield around this little like ring of signs and mascots and just sort of like frenzy in a way.” ESPN integrated “GameDay’s” signature elements, like crowd signs, as core design components. The “GameDay” design uses signs and posters to add depth and texture. “How do you not embrace that and capture that energy?” said Girardin. Instead of contradicting “GameDay’s” established visual style, ESPN modernized and expanded upon it, ensuring the show retains its identity while aligning with the larger college football brand. For the college football rebrand, ESPN collaborated with Two Fresh for the event package and edit toolkits and Compadre for the “College GameDay” components.