Case Study

TheTwoPointOne

Posted by Frazer MacRobert on

In the simplest of forms, TheTwoPointOne was created to focus on “The numbers and stories behind Scottish Football”. This team of journalists, football fanatics, and aspiring media moguls had a vision to provide higher quality coverage of the Scottish game, and had a vision for their brand.

'TheTwoPointOne' (2.1) logo displayed next to a floodlight.

The name is based on the percentage of the Scottish population that attend football stadiums each weekend, accounting for 2.1%. With their brand named upon statistics, it mirrored their aim to base their work on statistical evidence and educated thought. The plan was to bring a premium subscription service to Scottish Football News, mirroring some of the success of current major players such as The Athletic.

At the time, no other company was able to provide accurate, detailed statistics from each league game, giving TheTwoPointOne an immediate gap in the market to fill.

Branding

After explaining the concept to our team, we explored various visual concepts for the brand design. We felt that a modern brand needed a strong, modern typeface that matched the design zeitgeist, and the team at TheTwoPointOne also sought a minimalist, but powerful logotype.

As is standard practise at Clan United, we aimed to provide three core variations to the logo design: Standalone Logo; Text Logo; and a combination of Logo & Text. The reason for splitting the logo into three is to consider the long term usages across different platforms. Standalone logos are particularly important for App Icons, Website Icons, and brand awareness. Text logos work well for promoting the name of the company, and for powerful brand retention without imagery. Finally, the combination of logo and text creates a nicely packaged brand image.

For the logo, we considered how we could represent both statistics, football and the core 2.1% stat within one simple design. We decided to create a Pie chart with ‘2.1%’ sliced out of the chart. The chart also has a subtle nod to the circular shape of a football, allowing for future texture overlays to be considered. As it was a new brand, putting the number ‘2.1’ in the centre of the design was perfect for quickly getting the brand name established.

TheTwoPointOne (2.1) logo and tl;dr adaption for a new feature.
An adaption of the logo with a custom TL;DR section design

Picking a powerful colour scheme can help market some of the emotion, values and general brand essence. The team at TheTwoPointOne were confident that they wanted their design in purple, which is an excellent colour to indicate a brand being: original; respectable; distinguished; creative; luxurious; and premium. Furthermore, media outlets can often be accused of biased, so certain colour schemes could have suggested loyalty or alignment with particular teams; Purple is largely unused in Scottish football for home kit colours, allowing TheTwoPointOne to carve out their own section of the market.

Content

New brands launch with a blank canvas, one that needs quickly filled to retain interest and hold customer attention. Whilst a stellar concept can capture intrigue, it’s advantageous to launch a brand with some initial materials, such as engaging social media and website content.

Clan United worked with TheTwoPointOne on various sub brand projects, and individual pieces of content. For example, we have listed various visuals below:

An example of a TheTwoPointOne paywall, created by Clan United/ Clanutd
We created bold, modern, paywall graphics for TheTwoPointOne.

Combining images and text, in a simple yet effective style, gave a premium feel to much of the social media content.
Podcasts have been a key feature for TheTwoPointOne, we created a sub-brand that jovially suggested the main logo was a person’s head, with headphones on to listen to the podcast.
For printed adverts, we kept a simple, minimal style and applied the logo to the background faintly to add a professional element to the clean layout.
For their ‘Talking Tactics’ feature, we created a sub-brand that aligned with TheTwoPointOne. Turning the ‘i’ of tactics into a double headed arrow carries the suggestion of a tactics sheet for player positioning; The surrounding speech bubble supports the concept of the sub brand, as an in-depth vocal interview.

More about TheTwoPointOne

Scottish football is as weird as it is wonderful but even the most ardent supporters of our national sport will admit that when it comes to online coverage of the SPFL and Scottish national team there’s a lot of unnecessary noise.

In an attempt to offer something a little different, we provide two podcasts and three newsletters every week that hopefully do exactly that.

TheTwoPointOne : https://ttpo.substack.com/