Ahead of the 2013 PromaxBDA Sports Media Marketing Summit in New York City, Brief spoke with Anna Minkkinen of loyalkaspar about creating the new network identity for Fox Sports 1 ahead of their launch last August. Fox Sports EVP of marketing Robert Gottlieb will talk about the network launch at this year’s summit on Nov. 19.

When Fox announced that it was launching its own sports cable network Fox Sports 1 to rival ESPN they were faced with one big challenge: how do you create an identity and stand out when you’re taking on the “worldwide leader in sports.”

Easy: don’t think about making a sports network.

“We were looking at Fox in general, as in the broader family of what Fox seems to represent,” said Anna Minkkinen, creative director at loyalkaspar, which developed the network identity for Fox Sports 1. “The one thing that always sticks out about Fox is personality.”

Minkkinen said that loyalkaspar wanted to move away from the self-serious and self-important tone that seemed to inhabit most of sports television and embrace the fun of watching the game with your friends.

“What makes sports fun is that anything can happen. Our package is inspired by that sense of possibility and excitement,” she told Brief.

Their creative strategy: position the new Fox Sports 1 as the color commentator of the sports media world. Her team focused on making the identity both bold and bright, to match the on-air personalities of the talent that the network had hired—many of whom were former athletes themselves with colorful backstories.

In creating the new on-air identity, the first element that really clicked, Minkkinen said, was the type. The typography is bold and brash, mimicking the attitude the network was aiming for on air.

The photography also needed to break the mold. Out went head-to-toe shots of talent posturing for the camera. In came promo designs that wouldn’t seem out of place promoting the latest Fox sitcom.

Minkkinen’s team also developed a reversible blue-on-white and white-on-blue color palette that mimicked the concept of “home” and “away” jerseys. A pop of gold accenting added a bit of warmth and kept the palette bright, she said.

But perhaps the most striking element in the network’s identity is the “cascade” feature that accents most promos.

A fluid centerpiece to the graphics toolkit, the cascade feature drew inspiration from the “wave” that’s seen in stadiums around the world, using a series of cascading walls to reveal titles, photos and information.

“The cascade design connects the network look of Fox Sports 1 to the style of their flagship show Fox Sports Live,” Minkkinen said.

The end result, she said, is something that avoids the dark, gritty and intense graphics and imagery that plays on the metaphor of sports being a war. Fox, she added, has a “west coast personality” which is bright, open and fun.

“They don’t want to look like ESPN,” she said. “They want to look like their own identity.”

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