Inside Twenty3: The Design Team, our secret weapons

We love the Toolbox, and, as you may have noticed, we talk about it quite a lot. But, behind our product and its various virtues is a team of great people.

We have an eclectic mix at Twenty3: from engineers to video animators, data scientists to account managers, plus many more. Everyone across the business plays their part in developing and improving our product on a daily basis and servicing our customers to the highest standards possible.

But, when it comes to onboarding a new customer, there’s one dynamic duo in particular who come to the fore, and so, in the first part of our dramatically named Inside Twenty3 series, it’s time to shine a light on our Design Team, Duncan Boddy and Olivia Wileman.

Duncan and Olivia have extensive experience in a range of different industries and have sprinkled their design stardust across myriad household names, including the likes of Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, Shell, Leicester City and LiveScore (to name but a few).

They’re the driving force behind why our graphics look so good. One of the real challenges in this industry, and one of our real strengths, is taking ‘raw’ data that’s complicated to deal with (and even more difficult to digest) and bringing it to life in beautiful visuals.

This is something that Duncan, who has over 20 years of experience across print publishing and media, marketing and communications and more recently sports tech, recognises.

“The challenge of designing data-driven infographics is taking complex information and simplifying it, in order to communicate innovative analysis quickly and efficiently to a fast-moving audience.”

Our Smart Graphics and Smart Reports tools exist so that people—from content creators to analysts—can produce their desired ‘asset’ quickly, anytime, anywhere, and, importantly, without offending any brand guidelines or going anywhere near Microsoft Paint (other basic graphics editors are available) at 10pm on a Saturday night.

Often, one of the (many) reasons they need our tool is a lack of access to in-house designers, because they either don’t exist or are overloaded with competing priorities. 

Our Design Team work with our customers to create an entirely bespoke range of graphics or reports in their colours, fonts and style. 

Many of these include our visualisations (which, again, are set up in customer branding) and populate automatically along with other data once you select the player, team, stat, or, to use the official term, entity, you’re interested in. 

But, we also cater for a plethora of other graphics—quotes, breaking news, collages, and the like—that we know our customers like to use to engage their substantial audiences.

Ultimately, the aim is to give power to the user and allow them to be self-sufficient—a last-minute brief lands on an analyst’s desk and they very quickly need to produce an accurate, detailed dossier that looks good and is easy to digest. Or a freelancer covering the late Premier League fixture on a Saturday must ensure their match report is embellished with on-brand graphics covering line-ups, full-time statistics and the man of the match.

Our Design capability is, therefore, very flexible; we can adhere rigorously to strict brand guidelines, as we’ve done with Sky Sports or we can start at ground zero and help to create a brand new look, feel and identity as we did not long ago with Squawka.

On the latter, Duncan and Olivia have (and always manage) to think on their feet, be creative and build a consistent identity that is dynamic and flexible enough to work across multiple design assets and various media.

Duncan acknowledges that our partners showing openness and willingness to collaborate is critical to this working.

“The challenge is made easier because of the way we work with the different organisations. All of our partners are very open to creative ideas. We work very much in partnership with open channels of communication where we often brainstorm and work on live projects collaboratively as they evolve naturally.”

For clubs—without delving into the specifics—we ensure that all reports are not only accurate, and can be exported at speed and in bulk, but, thanks to the magic of Duncan and Olivia, look professional, impressive and fit seamlessly within the club’s branding policies.

When you’re stretched, rushing and up against it, the human tendency can be to settle for something generic—‘this will do’—but the expertise of our designers and the efficient nature of the Toolbox prevent standards from ever slipping.

The biggest compliment I can pay to our product and service is that our templates don’t look like templates; each graphic or report looks like it’s been designed there and then.  

We don’t believe that deadlines and overwhelming workloads should punish the individual by driving down quality. Achieving quality and quantity is the whole raison d’être of our business.

This is why Duncan and Olivia are—or used to be until we wrote this article—our secret weapons. 

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TL;DR—when you sign up to the Toolbox, you don’t just get the Smart Graphics or Reports tool, you get exclusive access to our top-class Design Team (they’re lovely to work with, I promise).

If you work in football in the Media, Broadcast, Agency, Betting or Club industry, and feel you could make the most of our Graphics/Reports tools and Design team, don’t hesitate to get in touch or request a demo.