Light or dark color palette? Simple or detailed design? Which font to use? There’s a lot of questions everyone has to answer when it comes to choose a proper visual look of a new website. We will try to help you make the right choice, and make your ScoreFrame-based minisite unique and appealing for future users.

I already have an existing website…

Great! My job here is done! 

Uhmmm, not exactly   Customers such us bookmakers or sport organizations usually have their main websites already available online, so customizing ScoreFrame for them may be easier, but still they have to provide us a company logo (preferably in a vector format file like .ie, .cdr, .pdf, or a .png file with transparent background) and information about company fonts and colors. In the Perfect World it would be great to receive a Brandbook/Corporate Identity Book with all the company information, but it’s usually a bit hard to get one, especially when there’s a deadline ahead  In such situations we just use the existing website to copy the general look including colors, fonts and – sometimes – background images. But keep in mind it may not be 100% perfect without a Brandbook provided.

I need a brand new design!

Before we start, we also will need your logo. It will give us an overall ‘feeling’ of the upcoming website. We don’t recommend starting designing a website without your logo, because in the end they may not suit each other well.

Read more about how we customize ScoreFrame for you – PART 1

Light or dark color palette?

In general, light color palette makes a cleaner look and may give the user a feeling of the more reliable website (and this is a HUGE advantage, your users just crave correct sports data!) while the darker, especially black design, may be perceived a as less trustworthy. On the other hand black is the color of elegance, luxury – often used in premium/VIP products – so if you want to give your users more classy feeling, go black – maybe even combined with gold/silver?

The darker colors are also more comfortable for a night-use, so if the visitors of your website are more likely to follow sports from the other side of Earth evening by evening, it may be a good choice!

Which color to choose?

ScoreFrame is all about sport so all the saturated greens, blues, yellows, oranges,  reds will suite well! Did I accidentally mention all the colors? Almost!  The truth is every vivid color will do the job, because this kind of colors are associated with energy and vitality. But those colors are widely used throughout the sport websites, so it’s hard to look original with them.

So maybe it’s a good idea to use the totally unexpected color combination to stand out of the crowd? Yes! Premier League is definitely one of the most recognizable leagues in our Galaxy and take a look at its colors – purple and pink! This unusual color combination in the world of sport (for cosmetics, it’s totally fine;)) makes it even more memorable!

Another popular trend today is using of pastel colors. Although it doesn’t correspond so well with sport, it may be another way to have an extraordinary site.

Read more about how we customize ScoreFrame for you – PART 2

Rich or minimalist design?

Sleek, minimalist design dominated the World Wide Web few years ago. Users got tired with the super fancy design of the previous era. It was also a trend provoked by the growing mobile use of the websites – they had to be very lightweight in the matter of kilobytes to load fast using 3G/4G network, so no unnecessary elements nor high resolution uncompressed photos allowed! Sometimes this led websites even to look primitive instead of clean and simple (like the CSS file didn’t load ;)). Today, with LTE available in many countries, this problem gradually decreases letting designers to spread the wings again. Also the studies shows that about 66% of users prefer rich and beautiful over plain design.

So what is the perfect recipe for ScoreFrame design today? Try to combine minimalist, fast loading interface with some nice looking photos/custom graphics in the background. You can even use different photos for each sport subpage as we did on our demo website – check demo of STATSCORE ScoreFrame here.

Which fonts to use on a sport website?

There are trillion zillion of fonts out there so it is pretty difficult to choose the perfect one. Thankfully, there’s a simple rule – if you’re not sure, choose the standard! Popular font families these days like Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Ubuntu will always do the job. You can also combine them with something a bit more fancy like Raleway or Oswald (for headlines for example). Usually the best choice is the sans serif fonts (so those that look more like Arial/Helvetica, not like Times New Roman :))

There’s really a lot of texts like countries, leagues, teams or players names, results, stats and so on on our ScoreFrame minisite, so it is important for the font to be rather compact – we do not recommend to use wide or monospace fonts, because they consume a lot of space. Check here (Days One font vs Roboto, same text “Cristiano Ronaldo”, same sizes, different width):

Also the handwriting-like fonts won’t suit the sport site – they are usually hard to read in smaller sizes (Great Vibes handwriting-style font vs Roboto, same text “Cristiano Ronaldo”, same sizes, the first one barely readible):

For technical reasons we use only the fonts from Google Web Fonts library because they works correctly in every browser – both desktop and mobile. But don’t worry, there’s still 900 font families to choose from 

Final word…

OK, so now you have some hints about style, colors and fonts you can use on your sport website. But if you’re still not sure what design will be the best for your ScoreFrame – don’t bother! We are always here to help! Our Creative Team will be happy to design something suitable and unique especially for you!

 If you want to get in touch to find out more, just contact our Customer Success Team at cst@statscore.com. We will be more than happy to schedule a call and discuss how ScoreFrame can help your organization!