ESPN dedicated nearly two years to completely overhauling its college football graphics, resulting in a visual identity seamlessly integrated across traditional television, streaming services, social media, and marketing initiatives. This project served as a design refresh and a pivotal test for ESPN's ESPN Creative Studio, showcasing a more unified collaborative process among its creative, production, and digital teams. The strategy encompassed college football as a holistic entity, aiming for consistency across various 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,” stated Marissa Dempsey, director, creative strategy & integration, ESPN Creative Studio. Dempsey described the process as a “first-of-its-kind approach” within ESPN, encompassing brand positioning, logos, and on-air elements. “In the past, branding work often happened in silos,” Dempsey added. “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 rebranding coincided with ESPN's direct-to-consumer platform launch, presenting opportunities to attract new viewers and acknowledge diverse engagement 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 vast ecosystem, including 136 FBS teams needing individual animations while maintaining 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 commented. “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 needed to work across traditional TV, digital platforms like YouTube and 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, including a refreshed “College GameDay” package, centers around the stadium atmosphere. “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 integrates elements like bleachers and field lines. This stadium concept extends throughout the animation, with all elements designed to “activate and energize that environment and flood team color through it with typography, team logos, team color and make everything vibrant.”
This vibrant style is a deliberate departure from ESPN's previous, more cinematic approach. “That was an awesome look,” Girardin acknowledged. “But we wanted to purposely diverge from how moody and intense that was.” The team adopted a mission of being “bold, colorful, energetic and fun,” aiming to “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,” Girardin stated. The graphics incorporate unexpected elements, such as animated hands interacting with design elements. “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 explained. “It’s like, why not? It’s fun.”
The 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 visible, with side panels for extra content without obscuring main elements. “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 fully utilizes the 16:9 aspect ratio. “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 during touchdowns, scoreboard visibility is maintained. “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 approach to treating creative projects holistically, integrating marketing materials with the broadcast package. “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 utilized lessons from 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” required a unique approach, preserving its established visual identity while integrating with the overall rebrand. The “GameDay” package uses a “center stage” concept, showcasing the show as “the epicenter of the college football world” and “the hub of the college football world.”
This acknowledges “GameDay’s” unique cultural role; it's not just a broadcast but a weekly event. “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. The design incorporates crowd signs as foundational components, building layers and texture. “How do you not embrace that and capture that energy?” said Girardin. Instead of a radical change, ESPN modernized and expanded upon “GameDay’s” existing visual elements. ESPN collaborated with Two Fresh and Compadre for this project.