Finally, on CBS, the football matches the business cards
Finally, on CBS, the football matches the business cards. Nowhere else will you find as much love for the ampersand as in this piece on broadcast NFL graphic packages…
The score bar at the bottom of the screen during a football game has an obvious function: It tells you how many points a team has scored. In some cases, such as the 2021 Chicago Bears, this function is ceremonial. Nonetheless, we primarily use the score bar as an information device. But viewers intuitively understand it as a design object, too. Each network’s score bar has its own feel, and broadcasters use that feel to shape your experience of the game.
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The EXTREMELY ITALIC visual language of Fox’s graphics package frames the sport as a fast-paced video game, and the compact dimensions of the scoreboard allow the network’s look to translate gracefully from a TV to a vertical phone screen. (I’ve previously detailed my admiration for the shrewd, device-agnostic design choices of Fox Box 2020.)
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NBC has the marquee primetime slot and employs a graphical approach to match. The look of Sunday Night Football’s score bar casts the game as an epic drama. Every element of the score readout appears to glow. Gratuitous streaks of light spill from the timeout indicators along the bottom, evoking the awesome high-contrast radiance of stadium lights after dark (in particular, those lights as seen through a movie camera). Areas of shadow heighten the contrast and add dimension to suggest the stadium’s depths. The team logos looming in those depths are huge, too big even for the very parallelograms NBC has built to contain them, giving a larger-than-life air to the gladiators on the field.
And... then, there's CBS in years past:
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... and in The 2021 version:
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