Rebranding SportsCastr — A Live Video Streaming Platform

Four months back, the SportsCastr team and I set out on an ambitious rebrand. I wouldn’t call it a complete overhaul by any means, but for various reasons we thought it was a smart decision moving forward for the company. Fortunately, we were able to keep some of the most recognizable elements of the logomark, making it a smooth transition. In order to tackle the challenge, we had to prioritize certain aspects over others.

To provide a little context on what SportsCastr is:

SportsCastr is an ultra-fast, lowest-latency live video streaming platform for the sports community. Fans from around the world can tune in on any device to watch any broadcaster live and interact with other fans. When you’re ready to stream, simply download the app or go live on your laptop or desktop computer. From automatically-generated and interactive on-screen graphics, to opening and closing sequences, SportsCastr will make it look like you’re on TV, regardless of where you are.

Let’s dive into how we tackled the rebrand, why we made the decisions we did and what we learned throughout the process.

Logomark

Being an app and website based product, we knew the app icon and logomark was a good place to start. Knowing we were starting with a solid foundation, we had somewhat of a safety net to explore. We tried out hundreds of different ideas, both similar and quite different from where we started. We bounced around various ideas that were more literal, some more symbolic and abstract, but eventually came back to a cleaner iteration of the old logomark.

As with the old logomark, we were able to maintain the camera shape that is made out of the negative space inside of the C, a subtle ‘Easter Egg’ that most people won’t notice right away. The S was changed to be more modern, sleek and sporty with a less collegiate feel by chopping off the terminals. The resulting mark is much more legible at small sizes and does a good job of fitting the future vision for the company.

Logotype

One of the most significant changes to the brand was the logotype we landed on. We changed from a Roboto Light & Roboto Bold sandwich to a simple, monospaced, stacked logotype utilizing the typeface Industry Bold. We had already been using Industry as a display typeface for headlines and other occasional uses, so implementing it in a more front-facing way really helped tie the entire brand together better than it was before the rebrand.

Logo Lockup & Extensions

Interestingly, the old logo lockup didn’t include a version with the logomark. Those two elements were always used individually, but it really made for a headache. The logomark used in the app store and the logo on the website hardly looked like the same company.

As you can see in the new logo, we have removed the red “.live” tag from the brand standards. This is due to the fact that SportsCastr recently acquired SportsCastr.com and the trademark “SportsCastr”, so we felt it wasn’t necessary in the logo anymore. It also didn’t get represented in the logomark, so we felt that it made it more confusing all together.

SportsCastr being a tech startup and all, our products are still in the Beta stage and as such we needed a logo version to signify this quickly on the website and on the app. Similar to the old Beta logo version, it uses a wide tracked, all-caps Roboto Bold positioned below the logotype.

Knowing that the word “SportsCastr” would be used often in marketing materials and would often have words come before it, we designed the logo with this in mind. There is a dedicated space above the logotype that can be used to display phrases like “Be The SportsCastr”, “Find Your SportsCastr” and “Live On SportsCastr”.

Typography

SportsCastr had a very well defined and clean typographic palette going into the rebrand, something we knew we wanted to leave essentially untouched. After the rebrand, we are still using Industry Bold as a display font and the versatile Roboto family of weights for basically everything else.

Color Palette

The color palette remained essentially unchanged, with our 5 main colors and their respective tints and shades. What we have done with the rebrand is bring the signature Heatmap (red to yellow) gradient to the forefront, which was previously used on the broadcast stats viewer chart. It beautifully fills the outer C of the logomark, creating an eye-catching and unique mark in both small uses like a website favicon or larger use cases like on the front of a T-shirt or on the jumbotron at the Madison Square Garden. The Heatmap gradient was also applied in other cases where solid red or blue were previously used, including on the real-time on-screen overlays and in the custom video player.

Patterns

SportsCastr isn’t a pattern-heavy brand, but early on when we first created the initial SportsCastr identity, we began naturally using a pattern of dashed lines with Arrows, X’s and O’s, showing movement, organization and mirroring a play drawn in a huddle by a coach on the field or a sportscaster noting player movements on a monitor in a studio. We named the pattern “AXO” and left it unchanged during the rebrand.

In addition to the AXO pattern, we also occasionally use a blown-up version of the SportsCastr logomark, only displaying a portion of it at a time, to create a subtle watermark background on some marketing materials. This only had to be updated to the new logomark.

Photography

The SportsCastr Brand Standards had already laid out a clear photographic direction that we decided didn’t need to change with the rebrand. The SportsCastr brand blends a nice mix of black & white, isolated and full-color imagery, with a focus on live broadcasters, broadcasting tools, top-tier athletes, sporting equipment, venues and large cities that have a big sports presence like New York City.

Website

The website is easily one of the largest parts of the SportsCastr system when you factor in the various responsive states, device and browser restraints, additional screens needed to support the business that aren’t included the app, admin panels, legal sections, marketing pages, overlays, graphic generators and more. Working closely with the CTO, we combed through everything with a fine tooth comb updating each logo, logomark, app icon, graphic, product mockup and image meticulously. Luckily, we weren’t changing the name or how it’s used on the products, so that avoided a lot of headaches.

App

Interestingly, the app itself doesn’t really use the logo or logomark too often. Essentially the idea is that once you’re in an app, you pretty much know what app it is. There’s no need to plaster it everywhere, you only have so much screen real estate after all. App UI updates included things like the app icon, the logo on the loading screen, the background video on the splash screen and the real-time on-screen overlays used in broadcasts, among other things.

Social Media Feeds

Still widely neglected by many companies, social media feeds like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have become one of the most public-facing ways for somebody to find out about your brand. Once they know about you, they might end up at your website or app, but social media is many people’s gate to the majority of the content they consume online.

The SportsCastr social media feeds are managed in house, which allow us to be nimble and maintain a high-quality stream of content that aligns with the new brand vision. We also have an in house community support team that provides our power users a direct line of contact with the people making product decisions and managing the SportsCastr community. Working closely with and highlighting our most popular content creators has proven to be a great way to both drive traffic to our users broadcasts and fill our feeds with exclusive, high-quality content you can’t find anywhere else.

Over time, we have been able to create a system of unique video and graphic templates that allow us to showcase content created on the SportsCastr platform in a beautiful and unique way. These templates have all been shifted to the new brand and we are expanding the templates, allowing us to have more variation in content and provide our broadcasters more opportunities to acquire more fans.

Marketing Materials

This category includes a wide variety of elements, including everything from advertisements to various video assets, a downloadable press kit, press releases, pitch decks, email signatures, email templates, business cards, letterheads, notepads, office signage, backdrops, branded swag and more. This is probably the most extensive section, but also one that we knew could come toward the end of the process while the developers were implementing the website and app changes globally.

It’s Never Really Complete

Implementing a complete rebrand for an existing company of any size is an ongoing process. People will always end up finding old documents that need to be updated to match the current brand standards. It’s not always possible to make sure everybody’s copy of every document is updated, so it’s important to make sure people know it’s a team effort to ensure the rebrand is a success.

Throughout the 4-month rebranding process, the product also progressed a lot in it’s own right and we have some other cool stuff on the way. If you haven’t yet, I’d highly suggest checking it out at SportsCastr.com or on the iOS App Store. Stay tuned, this is only the beginning.

About the author

Dakota Berg is the Lead Designer at SportsCastr.