Client requirements

Gay Badminton Amsterdam (GBA) needed a website to provide information and online registration for their upcoming tournament.

I designed the website UI and graphics, applied UX testing, implemented registration and shopping cart functionality and online payments and created all the content (copy).

Design

For the tournament, I went with a large typographical graphic design that would "do what it says on the tin". I used a fun, almost whimsical font rather than the obvious use of a regal formal font. This was to prevent the tournament from sounding too formal. On some formats e.g the tournament flyer, I've oversized the graphic element to exceed the bounding box, margins so that it's cropped slightly adding some character and large amounts of impact.

The tournament is centred around the King's Day festivities and therefore i wanted it to project an air of light-heartedness. Choice of colour pallette was easy. This was King's day, therefore what would be more visually striking than to use orange as the primary colour. To give it a little bit more depth, and consistency with the parent GBA brand, as with that, the obvious treatment was to use a gradient effect on the backgrounds.

Copy (text) = Design

Copy = User Experience. And I've made that abundantly clear in my design, displaying how copy is a first class citizen, in how large the text is and how there is virtually no distractions from it in sections of the page. The temptation is often to frivolously embellish copy, but I've kept it concise and restrained but added some depth to it through the use of emoji's and other icons and of course with my headline graphic, Typography = Graphic Design.

Problem solving

One of the challenges creating the website was creating a simple, fast and effective method to register to the tournament. This presented an interesting interface design, user journey and real world logistical challenge to provide the right quantity of registrations for the tournament for each level (grading category). This made working out categorisation a challenge. The registrations could have working variations of the grading categories, but this added too much complexity and specificity that limited quantities for each category. For example, it would mean I could only have 2 tickets made available to competitors looking to play A in doubles and B+ in singles. So I needed to broaden the categorisation more. Hence I came up with the solution to make the user journey flow go from ticket type (Singles & Doubles, Doubles only and Singles only), and then funnel onto grading sub-categories (A, B+, B- etc.) and then finally onto the registration page.

Development

Coding the site was again, like the GBA parent site done bespoke HTML with the use of the bootstrap framework. This enabled convenient shopping cart integration right into the page.

Brand development & Marketing

I kicked off a highly targeted marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram, creating posts pre-announcing the event and launch dates to generate some hype surrounding it. Getting in contact with various relevant clubs that might be interested in the event to boost interest, establishing relationships with them to improve coordination. The pre-launch announcement has proved extremely effective generating a lot interest and registrations 1st hour of the launch, selling out on one of the categories of registrations.

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See the website walk-through video