UFC: 2022 Brand Refresh

Role: Art Direction, Design

Produced at: Troika / Client: UFC / Creative Director: Gil Haslam / Art Director: Adrienne Wollman / Producer: Ben Nelson / Design: Adrienne Wollman, Tim Smiley, Daniel Beaton, Christian Brown, Ben Bullock, Nick Barclay / Animation: Jim McDaniels, Dakota Hopkins, Christian Brown

After a hugely successful rebrand by Troika in 2015, UFC returned to the team at Troika for an extensive brand evolution with an emphasis on even deeper storytelling capabilities. I was fortunate enough to be the AD on this 9-month collaboration, which had a scope that encompassed everything from a whole new motion graphics package to the development of a custom brand font and social/marketing assets.

In addition to the initial concepting, I shared authorship over the primary design development and oversaw/directed all match package element design and animation. I was also responsible for developing and implementing the modular system engineering that allowed us to expand the narrative capabilities of the UFC.

The Package

This package was built to deliver flexibility. With the goal of increasing the ability to tell unique stories and increase contextual information, this package contains a toolkit of elements that are built to be mixed and matched to tell a range of stories across a broad range of use-cases. In addition to increased storytelling, the package was engineered to accommodate the full range of Fight Night and Championship events.

UFC_InHouseOpen_MatchupID_PPV_05_Dark_v3

Custom Font: UFC Sans

To complement the expressive storytelling of new graphic package, we worked with Darrin Crescenzi to develop a custom typeface called UFC Sans. The UFC Sans family consists of 30 individual fonts with a broad range of weights and weights as well as 6 additional display fonts. Included in the font family is a full set of symbols and specialty characters to meet the unique needs of the UFC.

Dana White’s Contender Series

As part of the refresh, we also re-designed the show package for Dana White’s Contender Series. Aggressive and unexpected, we stripped down the sophistication of the main UFC package to its rawest form to deliver big graphic impact with bold patterning and textural typographic details.