Design foundations for a football talent app
Talentive makes football skill measurable: players prove themselves in scored tests, coaches build programmes, scouts find players wherever they are. I was brought in to set the visual language and the core patterns that the client’s own designer would build on after I left.
A brand already existed: bold yellow on black, a strong wordmark, a tone rooted in competition. What did not exist was an app. My job was to make that brand work inside a mobile product footballers would actually enjoy using, and to leave behind patterns a team could extend.
Two audiences pulling in opposite directions. A sixteen-year-old winger needs it to feel exciting and rewarding enough to come back to. A scout comparing two hundred players needs it clean, dense and credible. One visual system had to do both without tipping into cartoon territory.
Kept the brand as it was and built the interaction patterns under it: a level system as the unit of identity, head-to-head challenges as the social hook, and leaderboards scoped so every player has a realistic context to compete in.
Talentive launched with the foundations I set, and the client’s internal designer took the product forward from there. The engagement loop that drives the app today traces back to that first wave of work.
The level is the home screen
“Level 20” is the first thing a returning player sees, next to their stats for sprint, wallball, reaction, slalom and stamina, and the reward points they have earned. Consistent training compounds into visible rank, which gives a player a concrete reason to test again tomorrow. It also gave the whole app a single unit of identity, the thing players mention first when they describe it to a teammate.
Challenges you can win, leaderboards you can place on
The wallball challenge became the primary social hook: direct challenges to friends, scored and ranked on the spot. Leaderboards scope to friends, local area and global, so a player training at a village pitch can compete somewhere realistic instead of staring at a national top ten. Rank-ups are treated as moments, with clear feedback, because those small wins are what bring someone back to train.
Handed off cleanly
The app launched with the system I set up, and the client’s designer took it forward. For a foundation engagement that is the right outcome: not owning the product forever, but leaving enough of a base that someone else can build on it with confidence. Seeing another designer pick up what you made and extend it is a better test of a system than any documentation.
- Mine
- Visual language inside the existing brand, core flows and interaction patterns for the first wave of screens
- Talentive
- The brand, the product, and everything after the handover