Overview
The Rugby League Players’ Association (RLPA) engaged us to develop the art direction and graphics suite for two of its key programs: Player Milestones and The Players’ Champion Awards.
While each program served a different purpose, both were ultimately about celebrating the players - from recognising career milestones throughout the NRL and NRLW seasons to showcasing the players voted as the best in the game by their peers.
Our job was to give each program its own visual identity, while creating systems that could handle a large and ongoing volume of content without losing quality or becoming repetitive.
Challenge
The two programs needed to celebrate very different moments.
Player Milestones had to work for everything from a player's first major 50-game achievement through to significant 300+ game careers. With players coming from different clubs, each with their own colours and identity, the challenge was creating something that felt personal to the individual while still being recognisable as part of the wider RLPA series.
The Players’ Champion Awards needed to feel different again. As an award voted on by the players themselves, the creative needed a more premium feel that reflected the significance of the achievement.
Across both programs, we also needed to consider scale. With a large number of assets required throughout the season, the creative systems had to be flexible and repeatable without every graphic feeling like a simple template with a different player dropped in.
Solution
We developed two distinct creative directions, each designed around the purpose of the program and the type of moment being celebrated.
For Player Milestones, we built a flexible system that could adapt to different players, clubs, colours and career achievements. Consistent typography, composition and graphic treatments connected the series, while photography, club colours and individual details allowed each player's graphic to feel like their own.
For The Players’ Champion Awards, we took the creative in a more premium direction. Player imagery, typography, lighting, texture and layered graphic treatments were used to give the awards their own look, with bespoke creative developed across contenders, nominees and winners for both the NRL and NRLW.
Importantly, both were designed as systems rather than one-off pieces of creative. That gave us enough structure to efficiently produce a large volume of assets, while still having the flexibility to make the bigger moments feel special.
Outcome
Across the two programs, the RLPA had a clear and consistent way to celebrate its players throughout the season, without every achievement looking or feeling the same.
The Players’ Champion Awards alone included more than 100 bespoke assets across the NRL and NRLW, while the Player Milestones system created a repeatable approach for recognising players from 50 games through to 300+.
The result was a creative system that could handle the volume and speed required across a sporting season, while still giving individual players and achievements the attention they deserved.
