Irish Football Fan TV
A football media brand rebuilt to run at news tempo.
Rebuilt the visual identity for an Irish football media platform, then produced over 100 branded graphics across two months, designed and delivered inside an hour while the stories were still breaking.
- 296.5KInstagram views in two months
- 21,541likes across the same period
- 100+branded assets, 3+ a day
The brief
A real audience, held back by the visuals.
Irish Football Fan TV is an established football media platform with an audience already in place. The content was being let down by how it looked: a mix of inconsistent Canva templates, blurry stock images and plain-text posts that did not read as a brand.
The owner wanted visual consistency. An identity that made every post instantly recognisable as IFFTV and worked harder on both Instagram and YouTube.
The logo was off the table, by the owner's call. So the refresh covered everything else: palette, typography, post templates, thumbnails, and the production of branded content at the speed football news actually demands.
The feed before the rebuild, against the templates that replaced it.
The brand system
Before any content went out, the brand needed a foundation.
Colour palette
Purple against lime green. A high-contrast pair chosen to cut through a feed of muted football content and stay identifiable at thumbnail size.
Typography system
Bold, high-impact type built for hook-first headlines, set for legibility at the size people actually see the content: small, scrolling, on a phone.
Post and carousel templates
Branded templates for every recurring format. Headline news posts, player-feature carousels, quote slides, transfer rumours, match previews. Each one with a consistent visual structure.
YouTube thumbnail style
A consistent treatment using the new palette, bold text overlays and Photoshop-retouched player imagery, built for click-through rather than brand consistency alone.
The workflow
News-reactive production, at the speed football moves.
Transfer news, breaking stories, manager quotes and post-match reaction all have to be designed and posted while the story is still peaking. An hour late is a different story.
The loop was direct. The owner sent a brief, usually the player, the story, the angle and a hook direction. I designed the graphic in Photoshop with full retouching and delivered it inside the hour. Through the summer transfer window that meant several stories breaking at once and constant turnaround pressure.
- graphics per day3+
- across the engagement100+
- brief to delivery<1hr
Photoshop and Camera Raw on every piece
Headline piece
Brighton boss hails Evan Ferguson.
A news-reactive Instagram carousel built around Fabian Hürzeler’s praise for Evan Ferguson, designed and posted while the story was still trending.
- Posted while the news was still peaking, not hours behind it.
- Bold hook headline with the retouched Ferguson image as the focal point.
- Lime green inset for the Hürzeler quote, so the post stayed instantly recognisable as IFFTV.
- Caption written as an open question, which drove comments and shares rather than passive likes.
- FormatCarousel, 2 slides
- StructureHeadline + pull quote
- Views38K+
- Likes2.6K+
Headline piece
Ray Parlour, Arsenal Invincibles podcast.
A YouTube thumbnail for a long-form interview with Ray Parlour, full of stories about Tony Adams, Roy Keane and that era. It had to compete in Arsenal fan YouTube against thousands of other clips, so it leaned on nostalgia and a punchy pull quote.
- The hook quote does the work: provocative, curiosity-driving, instantly clickable.
- Bold yellow type with a heavy outline and shadow, readable at the size that actually decides click-through.
- A composite of the interview screengrab and an iconic Adams celebration photo, for a then-and-now tension Arsenal fans read in a second.
- Logo placement and layout matched the wider thumbnail system.
- FormatYouTube thumbnail, 16:9
- Video views6.7K+
The work
The feed system.
Purple and lime green, the shield lockup in the same corner every time, and one headline structure the eye learns after two posts.
The thumbnail system.
Yellow on dark, heavy outline, the quote doing the work. Built to be read at the size a thumbnail actually appears, because that is what decides the click.
Results
Two months, measured on the posts themselves.
- Instagram views across the engagement296.5K
- Likes21,541
- Branded graphics produced100+
- Evan Ferguson carousel38K+ views, 2.6K+ likes
- Ray Parlour thumbnail6.7K+ video views
- YouTube views on videos carrying my thumbnails11K+
The Instagram figures are calculated from individual collab post insights across the engagement period, not from an account-level dashboard, so every number traces back to a specific post.
The daily cadence held throughout, including the peak of the transfer window when several stories were breaking at once.
Outcome
Brand identity, production system and execution: built.
In two months IFFTV went from a feed of inconsistent, low-craft graphics to a coherent branded channel producing over a hundred pieces, with real engagement behind them on both Instagram and YouTube.
For a football media platform the leverage isn’t in chasing one viral post. It’s in building an identity that makes every post immediately recognisable, then producing at the speed the news demands.