A major-league evolution
Founded in 1920, the National Football League is the global pinnacle of professional American football. It’s the most popular sports league in the country, the wealthiest professional sports league in the world, and the sports league with the most valuable teams. Its fans are legion. The Super Bowl is one the most-watched television broadcasts in the U.S. and its halftime show is the stuff of pop-culture mythology.
The NFL brand is a big deal. It has existed for over a century and carries a storied legacy. But even the most traditional of brands must innovate. For the NFL, this meant venturing into a world gone increasingly digital. The NFL needed to extend the brand identity as a sign of the changing times while still remaining true to its roots.
That’s where La Visual comes in.
Moving the chains
The NFL Network took its first significant foray into digital broadcasting with the NFL Game Pass—a mobile streaming service and app providing fans with live out-of-market preseason games, live broadcasts for local and primetime regular season and postseason games, and additional content from the NFL library. The NFLN wanted to redouble its commitment to fans to deliver a truly marquee direct-to-consumer experience by expanding its content offering and rebranding the NFL Game Pass. The new brand identity system needed to communicate this digital renaissance through a visual reconception while remaining recognizably part of the NFL.
While the brilliant creatives at the NFLN had no shortage of passion, ideas and talent, something else was needed to truly set spark to fuse. An outside perspective. La Visual was given the challenging task of creating a product logo that would resonate not only with a deeply devoted, traditional and fiercely loyal audience, but also with those stewards of the illustrious brand: the executives who live, breathe and love American football.
We accepted. And then we got to work.
Walking the (yard) line between innovation and tradition
We kicked off our brand illumination process with a deep-dive into the hundred-year brand history of the NFL and an exploration of the product design and branding of the NFL Game Pass to understand how both were expressed. We looked at all the ways the brands were brought to life in print, digital and experiential media—auditing a wide range of assets, from existing visuals to the branded experience at the SoFi stadium in Inglewood, California.
Because the brand carries such a profound legacy, it was imperative that we collaborate closely with NFLN’s marketing and product teams to unify our approach to the execution of the identity system. We trusted in their unique expertise, explored their existing concepts and thoughts and worked alongside them to generate a gamut of new ideas from the wildly novel to the deeply reserved. Together, we strove to design something that would capture the history of the past hundred years and yet could stand undaunted for the next hundred years.
The result was something we were proud and excited to present to the executive team: NFL+.
