Research: The Start To Every Athlete Design
As the NIL and athlete world grows, the need for content creators who are knowledgeable about sports becomes more and more essential. As an athlete myself, the importance for content creators to understand your sport is very essential to creating high-quality graphics. You want a designer who can connect to more than just design. Understanding the sport allows designers to dig deeper than the content and create something that has a connection to the athlete or game. Through research and mockups, designers can find great success in the sports design industry.
Research
In order to understand your athlete and the sport, you must do research. As a designer, it is essential to do tons of research before designing. Through some research, I found 4 essential research tips and focuses to help improve your overall designs.
1. Understand consumer behavior/personalities:
When designing, it is essential in creating for your consumer. In The Importance Of Conducting Research In Design by creative27 it says, “Research design gives the designer two types of insight. The first is a sense of action, which leads to empathy for the consumer. Secondly, understanding behavior will provide the design process with clues about patterns and practices” (creative27 11). Creating a sense of empathy is important as you want your consumers to connect personally to the graphic. Understanding the behaviors of your consumers can help find what makes them empathetic and allows you to emphasize that in your designs.
2. Allows designers to set a tone for the athlete:
An athlete, especially one who wants or has lots of NIL deals, wants to be able to create a tone or voice in their community. Creative27 discusses an essential question designers should ask when researching. “This clarity will then enable the designer to focus on the right part of the problem, which involves asking the question, “What problem does this product seek to solve?” (creative27 20). Athletes always have a voice and are passionate about some cause, organization, or world problem. Creating designs around solving or promoting the support of a cause can help gain more attraction towards the athlete and design.
3. Factor in familiarity:
As a designer, it is important to keep a brand image and drawback to the athlete. Researching previous designs and trends whether it’s with the exact athlete, the sport, or design trends in general, you want to keep the familiar things present. While outside-the-box ideas and concepts are important, in the sports industry, you want to maintain familiarity while making groundbreaking changes at the same time. Familiarity through design and research keeps the athlete’s NIL presence at the top of consumers’ minds.
4. Creates more information and content ideas:
Research, as you can tell through this blog is essential to growing your designs. Not only does research help you advance your original projects but it allows designers to come up with new ideas and multiple ideas for a single concept or project. Research is what allows designers to create so many mockups. For example, I created a motion graphic of the stats for the starting 5 players on the Quinnipiac Men’s Basketball team. Through my research, I found that each athlete had different stats to highlight. The different types of stats allowed me to reorganize or emphasize a specific part of my design over another. Research allows us as designers to create content ideas which in turn allows your athlete to grow quicker and to new levels.
Research is essential in understanding your athlete. Designers must know more if not as much about the athlete as they know themselves in order to create the best quality designs. As an intern in the sports industry previously, the importance of keeping up to date with your athletes news as well as understanding their brand image can mean the difference between a viral graphic.
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