Helping McLaren cycling team reach global fans

Team Bahrain McLaren is known to cycling fans as a team combining the best riders with the latest tech achievements in their sport. With such a backstory, creating a new web presence and presenting their mission to the world, while keeping in line with their well establishes internal design system.

With branding and a lot of visual design elements in place, the true nature of creativity comes into play - how do you use all the set pieces to create something new, and make it equally fresh and powerful in another medium, like the internet. How can you expand it into other channels - like email messages?

In cycling, fractions of seconds often mean the difference between success and failure. Cyclists need to push the limits of physical exertion and their own boundaries. To monitor and improve, the team constantly collects and analyses enormous amounts of data. We recognised this as insider information something fans rarely get to see, so we used it as inspiration and opened up all these processes to their fans and audience.

If you are a fan, you constantly want to keep track of your team - where are they, what races are they a part of, how did they do - to serve all this, in almost real-time, we designed processes for team members who maintained the website and social feeds and provided them with visual guides, helping them get best looking content out of often chaotic photo materials they get on the spot. Results were stunning and celebrated among the fans and within the team.

Successful sports teams often have multiple brands that compete for their piece of media and are willing to pay a lot of money for visibility so incorporating a way for sponsors to tell their stories and promote their technical breakthroughs to a broader audience was another piece of the puzzle we had to solve when building this website.