01/

THE
PROBLEM

The 29th Summer Universiade event sold out to large crowds of Taiwanese people cheering on our athletes in a wide range of sports. It was a proud day. However, live attendance at Taiwanese athletic events has historically been low.
As Su Li-Chiung, Taipei 2017 Chief Executive explains, most of the time, athletes play in empty stadiums. Without large crowds of fans to support them, athletes have trouble surviving financially through sports alone.

Why is it so hard for professional athletes to survive in Taiwan?
Athletes in Taiwan will face the difficulties of finding a job because most sports do not have leagues or enterprises to support. Moreover, Taiwanese athletes are lack of the skills and knowledge required to pursue a non-athletic profession since they spend their majority of their life training in a single sport. How can we progress the long-term development for the sports in Taiwan?

02/

THE
SOLUTION

Black Horse is a website that eliminates the issues facing Taiwanese athletics. By celebrating Taiwanese sports and highlighting ways to build a fan culture, Black Horse aims to change the way people view Taiwanese athletes.
Black Horse divides into 4 categories – Home, Fun, Career, and League. The Home section provides brief idea of the website. The other three categories – Fun, Career, and League offer its own case study with animated infographics of clear explanations. Black Horse’s unique character at top Banner was captured through the famous athletes in Taiwan with meaningful Chinese character for each section.

03/
RESEARCH

VISUAL LANGUAGE + MOOD BOARDS
-The top banner style inspired by the Chinese traditional calligraphy. I combined two Chinese character into one word to represent each category.
- Color pulled from an optimistically Taiwanese national flag palette and brightly neutral palette.  
- Contextual dynamic illustrations inspired by the sports branding.
- Overall inviting and accessible tone

04/

IDEATION

Digital Sketches
Black Horse toggled between Chinese traditional calligraphy and clean dynamic sports style. The final aesthetic was born on rice paper via the calligraphy brushes with halftone Taiwanese athletes that were scanned and edited in Adobe Photoshop. They were paired with the Raleway font family to create friendly illustrations referencing the historically Taiwanese athletic roots.

Wireframe
I used Adobe XD to make low fidelity wireframes of the website. Later, I transferred screens to Brackets where I wrote Html and CSS.

05/

BRANDING