Brazoria County Playbook

Overview

What:

Brazoria County Playbook is an annual print publication providing an overview of performance statistics, feature stories and player information for Brazoria County high school football teams in advance of the upcoming season.

Objective:

To redesign the product from the ground up as a fully-featured magazine, as opposed to traditional newspaper insert.

Why:

To both attract new advertisers as well as produce a product users and customers would be willing to both pay for and keep throughout the season. While The Brazosport Facts newspaper already provided game-by-game coverage, this would be a preview product that engaged with players and their families as a keepsake and informational product.

How:

Relying heavily on advertising insights, the product pivoted away from relying on player rosters/profiles to data-based graphics to illustrate team performance and long-form stories about team outlooks. This provided users with content that could be revisited throughout the season and track player performance during live games.

About the Design

The design of the Playbook was entirely new and not based on any existing templates. Developed using Adobe Creative Suite CS6, the design focused on a consistent design that would make it easy for users and readers to compare team performance at a glance without the need to read long story blocks to decipher information.

Graphics

The graphics were one of the key elements of the redesign. Instead of focusing on long, drawn out stories that would require a user to exclusively sit down and focus on reading a story, the new design relied on data-based graphics to illustrate team and player performances from previous seasons.

The reason behind this shift was a standardized design that remained consistent throughout the publication but featured design elements color-coded to correspond to the individual teams would both be more visually appealing and provide more information at a glance. This surface level information would draw readers further into the magazine for more information about their teams. This is as opposed to bombarding users with intimidatingly long stories that might push them to put the publication down and not dive any deeper.

Think of the graphics as a friendly “hello,” and the long-form articles as deeper discussion.

Using the corresponding team colors also made for second avenue of navigation beyond simply following page numbers.

UX and Editorial

The goals of the new magazine format were to minimize time spent seeking information, but expand time spent exploring new and relevant information.

While all copy was written according to Associated Press style, content outside of long-form stories were written in brief but relevant terms that could be consumed with a glance at a page.

Behind this was the idea that feature articles in the companion website and daily newspaper could deal with deeper coverage of teams and events. The detail pages featuring graphics were designed to be quickly read and brought out at a moment’s notice during a game.

Team statistics were displayed in a standard original template that made comparisons take seconds, as opposed to minutes — as they originally did in a story-based format. The new design streamlined this process through color coordination and a design that didn’t get rearranged from team profile to team profile.

But this is not to say every page was the same.

Team profile pages were bookmarked by pages of editorial content written as long form journalistic pieces, which acted as deeper dives into players, coaches and teams. These were written by the local newspaper’s sports editor and relied on institutional knowledge and interviews that local users/readers might be unfamiliar with but very interested to learn. While the vocabulary for users required an understanding of football terminology and local team names/nicknames, this product was targeted very specifically at that audience. In this case, the goal of growing a user/reader base was achieved by designing a product that was approachable visually.