MLB

Challenge

Major League Baseball was grappling with a fragmented digital presence, where common design patterns were treated inconsistently across products and platforms. This lack of consistency negatively impacted the fan experience and dramatically increased engineering build time.

Approach

Design a system built on 150 years of history and emotion evoked by the sport—incorporating the sights and sounds of the ballpark, through a modern lens.

Impact

While a proof-of-concept, the design principles uncovered within this work established an aspirational aesthetic foundation for a hyper-scalable system spanning web, mobile applications, and television. Subsequently, I joined MLB's internal team to continue developing their design system, where this work remains an ongoing source of inspiration, guiding us as we design a system infused with the energy and vibrancy of the modern game.

My Role

Move Quickly, Design Things

This was an ultra-fast project where our goal was to provide the aesthetic foundations for MLB's new system. The speed was atypical for projects at Instrument – but both parties were thrilled with where we landed in the time frame. MLB's design system has since evolved tremendously due to the introduction of a new brand design language (examples can be shown in private conversations)

Audit

Our team conducted a comprehensive audit of the existing digital ecosystem, meticulously analyzing mobile, web, and television platforms to identify inconsistencies and areas for improvement in user experience and design language.

Concept Development

We undertook an extensive, iterative aesthetic exploration, experimenting with typography, color palettes, imagery, and content organization. The resulting visual language captured the essence of baseball—incorporating the atmosphere of the ballpark through dynamic light/dark modes, personalized color palettes, immersive visuals, and clearer content organization.

Design System

We laid the foundational guardrails for a scalable design system, establishing core components, grid systems, and style guidelines that would eventually evolve into MLB's Basepath system.