Fantasy football isn’t just about the game—it’s about bringing people together, celebrating wins (and near-wins), and adding some friendly competition to the mix. As the commissioner of our work league, I was challenged with keeping participants engaged throughout the season. I decided to amp up the experience by branding the league and telling a story through the league standings each week.

The first step to creating engagement was building a brand that the league could get behind. I created a logo that didn’t stray too far from the look of other fantasy football graphics but was unique in its own right. I developed a vibrant color palette, using minimal gradients for a subtle color difference and warped text to enhance that unique feel.

At the end of every week, I would send the league a standings update so players can see where they rank among their competition. This resulted in increased levels of engagement (and smack talk) on our Slack channel and kept everyone excited for each matchup.

To make each week’s standings unique, I created a rig that allowed me to change the featured player in the animation. I also created a Photoshop template with the basic color corrections for the images in place, allowing me to bring in new images seamlessly and save them out for my After Effects file. All these elements helped to make the standing videos unique week to week and made my workflow more seamless.