The Gist

With the majority of sports media catering to men and avid sports fans, The Gist saw a white space to engage a different type of audience. This audience was severely underserved in the category, both from a reporting and readership standpoint - women between the ages of 24 to 45 years old. However, winning space in their inboxes is not an easy task.

In order to craft both the face and the voice of women in sports, we worked directly with the three co-founders of The Gist to better understand the unmet needs of our target and how we could offer value in both their personal and professional lives.

With the majority of sports media catering to men and avid sports fans, The Gist saw a white space to engage a different type of audience. This audience was severely underserved in the category, both from a reporting and readership standpoint - women between the ages of 24 to 45 years old. However, winning space in their inboxes is not an easy task.

In order to craft both the face and the voice of women in sports, we worked directly with the three co-founders of The Gist to better understand the unmet needs of our target and how we could offer value in both their personal and professional lives

After analyzing the competition and aligning on a whitespace, we set out to define a personality, tone, and voice that embodied and engaged our target. This personality and tone would act as a lighthouse for the brand and ensure freelance writers understood how to consistently capture and portray the brand voice.

The Gist needed to feel like a BFF - both sassy and smart, easy-going and spunky, and heavy on the sarcasm. She represents both the angel and devil on your shoulder. She’s someone who gets the most out of every second of life, is constantly dragging you along her on her crazy adventures. One minute, you could be at a charity sports event, and the next doing shots with the Raptors till 3 am. Whether wrapping up a yoga class or an all-nighter, nothing frazzles her.

After analyzing the competition and aligning on a whitespace, we set out to define a personality, tone, and voice that embodied and engaged our target. This personality and tone would act as a lighthouse for the brand and ensure freelance writers understood how to consistently capture and portray the brand voice.

The Gist needed to feel like a BFF - both sassy and smart, easy-going and spunky, and heavy on the sarcasm. She represents both the angel and devil on your shoulder. She’s someone who gets the most out of every second of life, is constantly dragging you along her on her crazy adventures. One minute, you could be at a charity sports event, and the next doing shots with the Raptors till 3 am. Whether wrapping up a yoga class or an all-nighter, nothing frazzles her.

Navigating the heavily copyrighted and rights-managed universe of sports proved a unique challenge. Working directly with stock imagery sites, we found workarounds through the use of illustrations and animated GIFs that allowed us to communicate our brand while delivering the latest in sports news in a quick and easy-to-navigate user experience.

Research showed a majority of our target consumed e-newsletters on their phone both at work and at home. With that in mind, we focused heavily on three design UX pillars – legibility, scannability, and scrollability, to deliver a simple and digestible mobile experience. Performing a full audit of both past and upcoming articles revealed the most popular and noteworthy components of our newsletters. We then established an ownable style guide with key iconography that allowed us to break content out into smaller digestible parts that allow a viewer to easily scroll through and quickly locate relevant information.

Building off the night's theme of "Unexpected Winter," we combined the delights of a winter wonderland with the curiosity and playfulness of the Hermès brand wildlife to create an experience that delighted and intrigued guests.

Working closely with the development team, we were able to create a particle-based snow animation that reflected a snowy wonderland and helped transition the experience from our overhead map to the individual event pages. Clicking on a pinpoint would take you to a specific location page, while a simple shake of the phone would transport you back to the event’s map. 

Upon site loading, guests were encouraged to shake their phone in order to explore some of the night’s key wildlife. A simple shake would animate the flakes in the shape of a horse, bear, fox and more, bringing an added level of imagination and engagement.