Le Tour 2018

Coming off a successful, award-winning 2017 campaign, we were challenged to continue to inject the promotions with fun and vigor for 2018 with the goal to attract new viewers.

The Tour is loaded with inspiration and provides many chances to have some fun and design sports graphics not typically seen on-air. Similar to 2017, daily social content specific to each of the twenty-one race stages was central to engaging existing Tour fans by being the ultimate Tour Guide. These social posts were anchored by weekly on-air promos for each of the three main race groups.

TYPEFACE

Bee Four from Adobe is a workhorse, not unlike the competing cyclists. When this promotional package came together, I took notice of how Killing Eve and Girls used bold titles at the front of to communicate the nature of the episode and was inspired to try similar approach for the Tour. Bold, quick, distilled and distinct. Bee Four doesn’t have an italicized font choice, so I worked to interpret an italicized version to punctuate forward momentum. Thankfully its geometric nature lended a helping hand here. Further, our promos often cram a lot of information and a condensed typeface works well to accommodate it all while leaving enough whitespace.

Color

The official Tour color is a golden-yellow paired with white and off-black. This color palate worked well in 2017, but when developing a new palate in 2018 to keep things fresh, we wanted to brighten it up and incorporate some different earth tones. This race is about conquering all that France’s natural has to offer and so this is where I drew my inspiration. I took a bunch of scenic shots from production and averaged the colors in the frame. This is how I landed on the muted green and violet. That they’re close to being secondary color pairings is a happy coincidence.

mOTION

Motion blur is one of the more frustrating things when designing around Tour footage; broadcast cameras simply don’t capture crisp moments. This however provided an opportunity and we leveraged blur and cyclical movements to create opportunities to get in/out from graphics to footage.

SOCIAL POSTS

Facebook and Instagram posts were the primary outlets for pushing stage-specific promotions. The Tour is an information addicts dream and we leaned more towards infographics to communicate state-specific information. We kept the spirit of 2017’s Ultimate Tour Guide concept, thought, and refreshed the 2018 graphics. This was the second year we’ve tried to make #croissantcount a thing; fingers crossed it takes off in 2019.