heating up
Client
Fox Sports
For the 2022 NASCAR season, we teamed up with our friends at Fox Sports to create a set of exhilarating and versatile promos along with a robust toolkit to rev up the engine for this Cup Series. We’ve worked with Fox Sports on several sports focused projects over the course of the last few years– primarily one-off events like boxing or wrestling, whereas for NASCAR, a set of promos would need to span an entire season’s worth of events. As always, we’re up for a new challenge and set out to design the look, set the editorial tone, as well as lend our expertise with musical style, scripting and voiceover for the promos.
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To begin, we met with our clients to get a full understanding of their wants and the goals they were looking to accomplish with the promo. We also kept the length of the Cup Series in mind, noting the need to have design that could carry the entire season and remain fresh. This project was multidimensional, and we maintained a great rhythm with our client throughout- narrowing down looks, tweaking design, and simultaneously scripting a spot.
We wanted to design a graphic language filled with big color, big type and big textures to embody the spirit of NASCAR and really feel like car racing. All of the textures we used were inspired by the sport of racing- sparks, bubbling asphalt, paint tearing, elements of the track and more.
This broad range of textures complemented the color palette, which was inspired by the NASCAR brand, and is incorporated into the toolkit to assist in the storytelling throughout the season.
The first promo to air promoting the season opener: the legendary Daytona 500 that takes place annually in February in Indianapolis. The team of artists working on this project had a great shorthand with Ross and Carol managing the design approach and then Casey Drogin managing the audio, editorial and animation.
In addition to the editorial elements and spots, we delivered an extremely robust toolkit with a huge toolbox for our client to use throughout the season and create new elements that would stay within the design constructs we’d created. We brought in a lot of new techniques and easy ways to change color and texture and really unique transitional moments - everything from After Effects toolkits to a style guide.
For each race, we designed a race track system custom to the track featured for each event. This illustrated outline highlights pertinent information for each race about the city, track and unique attributes and was a really fun way to show the versatility and diversity of the racing venues.
This project gave us a unique challenge: create something that’s exciting plus has a lot of usability. Once we found the correct voice for the edits, we had a great time letting the design fly and translating that voice into editorial that really feels like racing- speed, movement and competition. We had a great time working on this project with the team at Fox Sports and can’t wait to watch the evolution of the 2022 Cup Series.
Props where props are due
