USL Cup Playoffs 2018

The look for the 2018 USL Cup Playoffs adapted elements from the regular season look and added personality and excitement for the conclusion of one of the most exciting seasons yet. The concrete texture used throughout the regular season becomes a worn paper texture, and the diagonal lines used in the regular season are represented using many rough lines that feature in various places. Using stylized roughness, jittering motion, and a low framerate, the assets used for playoff content seem as if they were drawn by hand and played through an old projector or on a flipbook. Emphasis is placed on the team colors for the playoff look - often relying on a single color at a time to represent each team. Adapting the regular season look to make it simpler, more colorful, and more “hand-drawn” gives the 2018 USL Cup Playoffs an approachable and authentic look that lets fans focus on the hard work their team put in all season and root for them to cross the finish line.

TYPOGRAPHY

Using the USL brand font Tungsten Semibold at the same skewed angle which was used for much of the typography throughout the 2018 season, the type is updated for the playoffs by using the primary color of the team names, offsetting the text using a stroke and halftone texture, and stacking the text with a justified orientation.

LOGOS

As much of the playoff look is simplified and emphasis is placed on color, the logos used in playoff materials are one-color logos using the teams’ respective primary colors.

PLAYERS

The real personality of the 2018 USL Cup Playoffs look comes from the animated players - eight different celebrations taken from throughout the season which animate for just over a second and then lock into a freeze frame. The players in the animations are left without any distinctive features (face, skin color, hairstyle, etc.) for a couple reasons - first, so they can be used to represent the team as a whole rather than one specific player, and second, so that each animated player can be easily recolored to represent any other team. The eight players are split in half - four are used for the eastern conference teams, four for the western conference teams, for a total of 64 unique animations for usage in playoff content.