What the World Cup taught me about people

What the World Cup taught me about people

Creative work becomes meaningful when it contributes to how people feel.

The football was always the star. Our job wasn't to compete with it. It wasn't there to draw attention to itself. Like a good referee, the best broadcast graphics are the ones you barely notice. If people spend the whole match talking about them, something has probably gone wrong. Our role was simply to support the experience.

That same lesson revealed itself in a different way through the match graphics. People often think of them as branding. I never really did. I came to see them as a way of helping people understand what was happening, as effortlessly as possible. Every score, substitution, line-up and statistic had to communicate almost instantly to people watching in different countries, speaking different languages and viewing the tournament on everything from ageing analogue televisions to the latest HD screens.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether something looked good and started asking whether somebody could understand it without thinking - that changed everything. I became quietly obsessive about details that almost nobody would ever consciously notice. The spacing between numbers. The hierarchy of information. How typography behaved in different languages. Whether information could be recognised a fraction of a second faster.

If we'd done our job properly, nobody would ever notice those decisions. That wasn't a compromise, it was the objective. The football remained effortless to follow because the information got out of the way.

Looking back, I realise I wasn't becoming fascinated by broadcast graphics - I was becoming fascinated by understanding. Why do some things feel instantly obvious while others feel confusing? Why do some experiences feel effortless while others feel hard work? I didn't have the language for those questions twenty years ago, but I found myself exploring them every day.

Working across three World Cups taught me one final lesson: The larger the audience became, the less I found myself thinking about design and the more I found myself thinking about people.

It's relatively easy to communicate with people who think like you, speak your language and share your cultural references. It's much harder when your audience is the world. You stop asking, "What do I want to say?". You begin asking, "What does this person need to understand?". It's a small shift in language, but it's a huge shift in mindset.

That way of thinking has stayed with me ever since - whether I'm working on a brand, a news channel, a digital product or simply writing an article like this, I find myself returning to the same questions: Can somebody understand this more easily? Can we remove another layer of friction? Can we make this experience feel more intuitive?

Looking back, I don't think the World Cup taught me how to design for billions of people. It taught me to think about one person. To understand what they need. To help them understand. And, if we're fortunate, to make them feel something too. Ironically, those lessons have very little to do with football. They have everything to do with people.

Whenever another World Cup comes around, I don't think first about the graphics we created or the projects we delivered. I think about the privilege of contributing, however briefly, to moments that became part of somebody else's memories.

I've come to realise that's probably the highest aspiration any designer can have.