Sportsnet Central - Rebrand 2023 🇨🇦⚽🏀🏈⚾🏒🥌🇨🇦

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Sportsnet Central is the flagship sports news program on Sportsnet in Canada. Airing multiple times, a day, it is the go-to source for the latest news from Canada’s #1 Sports Media Brand. They needed a clean, clear, modern visual identity that is robust and flexible enough to adapt to the enormous variety of sports they cover.

We’ve built a lot of systems for sports news shows and sports channels over the years, but working with the team at Rogers Media was a particular pleasure. We had time to work closely with their creative, production, and marketing departments to ensure that the final product met all their communication and technical needs.

Once we had developed the list of must-haves with the Rogers team, we were able to start imagining a concept to serve as the base of our visual system. We agreed with the Rogers teams that the new concept should represent the Central name as the previous concept had, but should have a new spin on the idea.

Be it fiction or sports, a story isn’t interesting or important if there isn’t some form of conflict at its core. Personal stories about an athlete fighting to come back from an injury to team-sized sized stories that unfold through the season to macro stories about how a sport is evolving all have a central conflict. This is what we wanted to capture in our concept.

We created rules for our motion theory. There should be two elements in opposition. They crash into each other expressing the central conflict. Because we needed to be able to adjust the different broadcast elements to the colors of the teams of each league, we relied heavily on motion to create a unified visual identity for Sportsnet.