“Working with Thornberg & Forester to bring our Sponsorship creative toolkit to life was an exceptional experience from start to finish. The team delivered bold, elevated work that stands out as a defining moment for our brand, setting a new bar for how our sponsorships come to life across every touchpoint. Beyond the work itself, Thornberg & Forester were phenomenal partners: deeply collaborative, thoughtful and steadfast under pressure. They consistently pushed the creative further while staying grounded in our goals, timelines and needs. We’re very proud of what we built together!”
– Liridona Ahmeti, Sr. Manager, Marketing & Creative Strategy
In our ongoing partnership with Spectrum, we were once again tapped to create a special-use brand toolkit, this time for sponsorship graphics. The goal was to design a striking, brand-forward system and to engineer a dynamic toolkit that would handle full sports sponsorship takeovers – from in-stadium graphics and outdoor advertising, to digital banners and social media posts.
Sponsorship deliveries are notoriously tricky. Sports arenas have changed dramatically in recent decades, evolving into cutting-edge entertainment destinations that offer an immersive fan experience and a wide variety of ways to engage with the game. And that translates to extensive custom LED builds and architectural features. These activations allow partner advertising and brand messaging to make a massive impact, but they also require advance planning – adapting creative for custom delivery formats, or even creating new designs to take advantage of new marketing possibilities.
Note: all visual examples herein illustrate the design system and its functionality (literal visuals are not finalized, in-market assets).
To date, Spectrum’s bright blue has been a bit underused in brand application. We saw that as an opportunity to make big impact with a bright blue-forward design. And to give the toolkit system more breadth, we also developed a team photo option (see 9×16 social examples for each above). This was an intentional departure from the tendency for current brand assets to live over a white background – for both aesthetic and functional reasons. Spectrum wanted to branch out from the look of the existing package and incorporate new elements. In addition, white backgrounds often interfere with gameplay in sports that include a white ball.
Style guide excerpts showcasing partner lockup application
The style guide excerpts above showcase our detailed approach to this design system. Logo application is fundamental to any brand package, and provided a perfect opportunity to establish a consistent visual thread. Team branding is extremely varied, and there’s no way to ensure that logos will exist in a consistent format. By applying the partner lockup guidelines above, we ensure a strong Spectrum brand presence while leveraging regional fandom.
Thornberg has executed many sponsorship deliveries for Spectrum in the past, and we were able to draw from this knowledge to create a robust and dynamic toolkit – streamlining the delivery and design process moving forward. And as already noted, there was a desire to branch out from the existing brand package and add some new elements. The new Spectrum brand is over a year old, and some elements had started to feel visually repetitive. This sponsorship toolkit provided the perfect opportunity to integrate some new ideas while making sure to preserve a clear connection to the master brand.
This knowledge also helped us maximize the toolkit for non-standard formats that are common in sponsorship deliveries, such as the animated ribbons below.
LED ribbons have become a fixture in all major sporting venues. These screens provide partner brands with the ability to create dynamic animated content, but also feature a non-standard extremely wide delivery format (with varying resolutions and frame rates). Creatively, our aim was to develop a design that showcased the Spectrum logo in a new and unexpected way, and to also make more effective use of messaging.
Once we locked down a design, we moved on to implementation. We developed a responsive master After Effects project that can generate ribbon assets quickly, at any resolution, at any duration, and at any framerate – along with fully customizable messaging options.
As seen above, many sponsorship deliverables incorporate the same or similar elements – the partner lockup (or Spectrum logo), messaging, and a team photo. Most out-of-home, digital, and social deliverables fall into this category. This creates a certain amount of predictability in how the design would look, but we needed to develop a bulletproof set of application guidelines to make our designs work in any format.
We looked at outlier cases from previous sponsorship projects to identify potentially challenging asks. Extremely wide and extremely tall formats became a particular area of focus, as they inherently push the limits of any design system. AI image-expansion proved extremely useful when reformatting team photos for these outlier formats.
Extremely small resolutions were also identified as a potential challenge. Solutions that work at a higher resolution may simply not translate to a smaller size – it’s never as simple as just scaling the artwork down unchanged. Our goal was to eliminate questions and provide solutions. As the size and resolution of the deliverable decreases, we reduce the amount of elements included. The simplest deliverables are pared down to the most necessary pieces of visual information: logos and messaging. This organized plan-of-attack allows us to quickly land on the right solution for any delivery format.
Developing strong creative that communicates effectively is not an easy task, but it’s what we do and we do it well. Making the work look awesome is expected, making the design work as a toolkit is necessary. Our final toolkitting process was thorough and exhaustive – ensuring that Spectrum would be ready for anything moving forward.
As seen in the detailed guidelines above, even simple logo placements were approached in a strategic and intentional manner. While these details could seem trivial at first glance, getting these specifics dialed in is the best way to ensure consistent brand expression no matter what the ask. This resulted in a final package that was straightforward enough to generate large volumes of work on a deadline, while also through enough to handle unexpected requests. As we set out to at the beginning, we were able to provide a set of guidelines and assets to streamline sponsorship deliveries for 2026 – and beyond.
What makes a great design system even greater is the ability to flex across seemingly infinite applications. We appreciate the opportunity to do just that with such a wonderful team at Spectrum, especially for a project of such massive scale, with nationwide reach and visibility. Thank you for your continued support and direction to help make this system a powerful expression, and evolution, of your thriving brand.
Matt Tragesser, Ken Krueger, Jase Kim
Matt Tragesser
Jacqueline Pereira