XplorSport

A brand new company based on a simple but ambitious concept of bringing live music to sporting events. This company was just an idea when brainchild James Morgon approached us with his vision.

In a recent talk on branding to an audience of entrepreneurs and business people, David Pugh used Xplorsport as a case study into the company’s process of branding creation which happens in 4 distinct stages.

    1. Identify Key Emotions
    2. Research and Create Mood Boards
    3. Sketch Initial Ideas
    4. Final Design Execution.

Discovering the Brand.

Meeting with the client we quickly established the key emotions of: Energy, Adrenaline, Passion, Excitement, Speed, Style, Testosterone, Technical Expertise and Glamour. As with all of our projects we quickly identify the feelings that we want to evoke in our audience of passionate sports fans. A lot of these emotions are also prevalent in passionate music fans, so right away there is a fantastic blend of these two industries that can immediately connect with the audience.

Mood boards

As a new brand it was important to identify the visual reference points, key industry players in both the music and sports industry, visual trends and similarities and this process helps to form new, original ideas on the direction and visual style of the brand.

Initial Ideas

The concept of directional arrows > < making up an ‘X’ was the concept envisioned for the brand by Freelance Graphic Designer, this encompassed the key emotions of speed, testosterone, energy and passion and also gave rise to the epic confrontations that take place at the highest levels of sport.

These concepts were applied to a variety of sporting arenas including most distinctively the Ashes, featuring England vs Australia.  Here you can see the arrows representing the 2 titans going headed to head with vertical symmetry of the arrow on the left being England and the Arrow on the right being Australia, these together form the X of the brand.

Final Design

From these initial designs and ideas it was clear that the sporting side of the visual language was absolutely covered and communicated, but there was a lacking from the musical side, so the brand had to be re-imagined and worked on some more.

David Pugh lead the redesign and re-structuring of the logo to include a sound wave that would echo though the X, there were a few directions this could go in as illustrated here. Also the main typeface of the logo moved from being a ver ‘ESPN’ style sporty font to something more neutral, classy, circular and slick which can also apply to the music industry.

Investment Deck Designs

The most important part of the project after the branding was to sell this vision to potential investors and partners and so a set of marketing / promo deck designs were commissioned and realised by David and his team.  These decks were to highlight what  Xplorsport could bring to global events like The Ashes or the Cycling World Championships.

To the left here we can see a quick flick though these two treatments, and how the branding can evolve seamlessly to suit any sport and any occasion using and utilising the visual language of the brand concept that was developed.

Website Design

Below there is an initial home page concept for the website design.