Client work
Talk 2B Heard
Made 2B Seen.
A brand identity and content system for a sports commentary platform with 830 posts, a real audience, and nothing holding it together. The takes are provocative but nothing around them holds an audience.
The problem
Talk 2B Heard is a sports platform built on a simple idea: fans have takes worth hearing, and most of them never get a microphone. News, debate, hot takes and entertainment across the NBA, NFL, boxing, UFC and the WNBA, delivered by someone who actually watched the game.
The content was doing its job. Nobody was staying to talk about it. 830 posts and 2,418 followers, with a typical post drawing 15 likes and 4 comments. One post had reached 1,098 likes and a few others had cleared a hundred - so the ceiling was real, it just wasn't repeatable. Everything else landed, got seen, and disappeared.
That's not a content problem. It's the absence of a place for people to come back to: no mark a viewer recognises, no thumbnail system that makes the grid worth browsing, no captions on content most people watch with the sound off. A viewer who liked a UFC clip had no way of knowing the NBA post three days later came from the same person.
Views are borrowed. A community is owned. This brief is about turning one into the other.
Who it's for
The core viewer is a sports fan, 18+, in the US, who consumes sport through a phone rather than a broadcast. They follow the discourse more than the box score. They watch with the sound off, in transit, between other things - and they decide within two seconds whether a post is worth stopping for.
That two-second window is the whole design constraint. Attention is the cheap part; every account can get a view. What's scarce is the viewer who comes back tomorrow, and the gap between a view and a comment is recognition. People engage with accounts they feel they know, and they only get to know an account that looks and sounds the same every time.
The identity
A logo suite in three formats, each with a job.
The emblem - a circular badge carrying the microphone, wordmark and year - is built for authority and permanence: merch, sponsor materials, end cards, anywhere the brand is standing still rather than moving. Its enclosed shape holds up against busy photography.
The icon is the microphone alone, built for the places the full lockup would be illegible: app tiles, video watermarks, story stickers, favicons. It has to work at 40 pixels, so the text is optional.
The lettermark sets the name in type for horizontal space - banners, thumbnail overlays, email signatures, print.
Every asset ships in black, yellow and reversed versions, as SVG and PNG, with usage rules covering clear space, contrast, and the things not to do. A brand system holds up only as long as it's applied the same way every time; the rules are what keep the identity intact after handoff.
The system
The grid is the storefront. A visitor landing on the profile saw a wall of video stills with no hierarchy and no reason to pick one. Purpose-built thumbnails give every post a headline and a consistent frame, which makes the grid browsable instead of a wall - and a visitor who can scan the page will watch more than one video.
Subtitles were the other half. Most sports content on Instagram is watched with the sound off, in public, without headphones; content without captions is content most viewers can't actually consume. Burned-in captions fix that for the silent majority and open the content to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing at the same time. Accessibility and reach turned out to be the same problem, solved by the same decision.
Yellow and charcoal are Pittsburgh's colours before they're anyone's brand palette. They carry the founder's city without having to say so, and they hold contrast at thumbnail scale where most palettes fall apart on a phone. Red appears rarely and marks position and nothing else. Two colours do the work; the third points.
The visual system is only half the identity. The other half is how the brand talks, and that's the half that drives engagement. Every post should be answerable - a viewer who agrees has nothing to say, while one who disagrees, or half agrees, has something to type. Three headline patterns hold the door open: the question, the claim, and the stakes.
How it gets measured
The system should be measurable, not just prettier. Every number the brief asks for is already in Instagram Insights - engagement first (interactions, accounts engaged, and accounts engaged as a share of accounts reached), then reach, then growth. Nothing here needs a spreadsheet.
Sorting posts by comments rather than reach shows immediately which headline pattern is being answered, which is the feedback loop the voice framework depends on. The brief sets a fixed baseline to read against - 2,418 followers, 830 posts, a typical post at 15 likes and 4 comments - with reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days from rollout.
Those figures are the starting point recorded in the brief, not results. The system has been delivered; rollout is pending, so there are no post-launch numbers to report yet.