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FIFA World Cup 26™
Location: New York, NY
Scope: art direction, creative development, brand design
Provider: On Location
FIFA WORLD CUP 26- OVERVIEW
It’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to talking about designing and delivering the visual hospitality brand experience for FIFA World Cup 26, the largest global sporting event in world history. I was brought in to tackle creative development, art direction, and overall brand design through the entire event production process, from concept through final delivery.
The creative work was strategic as well as unique in nature, as everything from small format and decor, to large format graphics, to photo ops and activations, to fabricated elements had to be designed in a way that could scale to 16 different host city venues in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and do so consistently while remaining unified to FIFA’s brand standard.
SECTION 1: LOOK & FEEL DEVELOPMENT
First, the overall look and feel of the program needed to be developed. The hospitality spaces our team was tasked to execute upon for each venue consisted of 7 different product tiers (our outdoor villages known as the FIFA Pavilion, and our indoor spaces such as Private Suites, Pitchside Lounges, Champions Clubs, Trophy Lounges, VIP and VVIP spaces) and these tiers were to be broken into 4 different colorways based on the tier level and audience.
The first task was to create concepts based around a high level of strategy using FIFA’s brand assets provided. Utilizing brand elements, logos, color, pattern, and taglines, I helped create a system that would ultimately guide the visual experience throughout the environment. To add another level of uniqueness to the system, each venue would get its own host-city specific pattern implementation, blending the universal FIFA look with local city flair.
SECTION 2: BRAND GUIDELINES
We then developed a variety of globalized application solutions and standardized them in the form of 16 individual venue-specific brand guides, in partnership with Streetlight Studios, that would eventually become very specific to each venue’s footprint.
SECTION 3: L&F ROLLOUT
From here, we were able to take the Look & Feel and start developing standard items that would be used across all venues, such as small format (the menu program, gift packaging, pillows and decor items, access control / credentials, etc), photo ops and activations, and fabricated elements.
Using our L&F brand guidelines as well as months of research, moodboarding, sketching, and designing, we combined forces with various production partners to art direct our intent for each area of scalable, large format executions. We also continued to design small and large format solutions for the entirety of the World Cup.
Another important strategic project that needed problem-solving was access control and wristbands. Multiple points of security had to be visible on each wristband, indicating the match number, match date, teams playing, and tier of hospitality. Being that we had many tiers of hospitality per match for 104 matches, one could imagine the complexity of the system.
SECTION 4: RESULTS & EXPERIENCE
Full case study coming soon!
