http://ag.nfl.com
HZDG
There is something ever so elegant in the almond-shaped rawhide ball spinning in deep blackness on the computer screen. The NFL is elegance itself, even if half the fun of a Super Bowl party is the beer, chips and the trash talk. To celebrate the then-upcoming 41st Super Bowl, the NFL Network produced a show featuring the previous 40 Super Bowl winners. The selected top 20 would be unveiled sequentially each week over the months leading up to Super Bowl XLI.

The NFL Network needed a website to “mirror this unveiling and to house all relevant information about the teams,” says HZDG senior art director John Whitlock. “To stir up a community aspect to the site, they wanted a section that would permit users to rank their top 20 picks, to be tallied into a leaderboard with chat room– style message boards for fan ‘trash talking.’”

The network wanted the entire site to be content-managed by its own internal team, the main goals being to support the buildup of anticipation for the next week’s episode, while serving as an online archive of all 40 Super Bowl winners. The site would include team-specific stats and information such as team rosters, photo galleries, video galleries and a pop-culture almanac from each team’s winning year. And the network wanted it all delivered through a slick, easy-to-navigate Flash interface.

“We relied on the use of Flash/video integration to help reflect the cinematic style of the TV show and keep the data-heavy content interesting,” says Whitlock. Flash was also an integral part of making the Fan Voting section an easy-to-use drag-and-drop component. To portray the subtle, elegant style of the show’s brand and motion materials, the glossy black tonality of the title screens was incorporated into the website design with the use of montaged photography and classic serif type. “Gold,” Whitlock notes, “was introduced as an accent color to help support the classic theme and play directly off the Super Bowl ring and Heisman Trophy imagery.”

Whitlock can’t emphasize enough just how important a collaborative, close-knit team environment is on a project like this. “Being able to bounce ideas off one another, openly, helps everyone feel excited about the work, and that in turn makes for a better final product.” Even now, the site is humming with traffic. “The fan message boards are still crawling with trash talkers,” says Whitlock. “Watch out for those Steelers fans.”
Romy Ashby