Branding & Identity | Art Direction & Campaign | Motion Graphics | Digital & Web
Arrow FPL: Building a brand from the ground up
The Project
Arrow FPL: A content brand built from zero to 1.4m monthly impressions, with no ad spend
My Role
Everything. Identity, content design, information design, animation, copywriting, web and channel strategy. Arrow FPL was a self-initiated platform, giving me an opportunity to hone and develop skills within a live environement.
In Fantasy Premier League, a green arrow is the ultimate goal. A green arrow has an intrinsic connection to success and positivity within the FPL community. It means you’ve overtaken your friends in your local league, or jumped up in the global rankings; it’s what motivates everyone.
When deciding the name of the account, I wanted something snappy, memorable and ultimately, easy to search. Arrow FPL ticked all those boxes. Simple, positive and “FPL” in there for search optimisation.
When it came to exploring the brand development, utilising the a green arrow motif tied together all of the elements needed to create a quick, recognisable presence within the online FPL community.
Bold, contrasting colours helped to convey confidence and improve visibility in an ever-saturated social feed.
ArrowFPL was born.
The development
Fantasy Premier League has one of the most active communities on social media: thousands of accounts sharing tips, stats and opinions every week. Almost none of them looked professional. I'd played for years and knew the community's problem wasn't a lack of information, it was a lack of trustworthy-looking information.
So the brand was designed around credibility. The look was designed to be eye-catching while able to be consistent and versatile to quickly build recognition. My tone of voice took cue’s from the modern Match of the Day format: pundits who are authoritative but relatable. Clean, recognisable, consistent content in a feed full of screenshots and scrappy graphics.
The Solution
Weekly social content lives or dies on templates, so the identity was built as one: a disciplined structure of player cards, captain picks, ones-to-watch and stat summaries in a single acid-green-and-charcoal system, producible to a matchday deadline every week for over two years.
The information design went deeper than social cards. Season fixture-difficulty matrices and gameweek planning posters compressed hundreds of data points into single, legible artefacts, work the community shared precisely because nothing else in the space presented data this cleanly.
The Growth
Zero paid advertising.
As a project and a brand born out of a hobby, there wasn’t budget scope to utilise paid advertising. As a result, growth came from the content itself: graphics designed to be shared, data posters the community circulated as reference material, and format extensions, large-format printed posters and branded mugs used as giveaway incentives for engagement.
Reach consistently outran the follower count by orders of magnitude, which is the tell that content, not audience size, was doing the work.
Key Performance Stats
The close
I wound Arrow FPL down deliberately in January 2021. Its reputation was built on quality, and running it alongside a full-time design career no longer left the hours to maintain the standard that made it popular. The decision to wind it down was better than letting it decline in quality and tarnish the reputation.