Yahoo Sports: Milan-Cortina Olympic Games

ABOUT THIS ENTRY

To cover the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games, Yahoo Sports developed a powerful visual identity encompassing a full branding system and social media graphics suite.

The Yahoo Sports design team built a design system grounded in elegant key imagery and typography, a beautiful color palette, and a graphic architecture that scales across every format without sacrificing visual integrity. The result was a unified creative identity that performed consistently across social content, editorial placements, and product integrations, maintaining its quality and coherence throughout the full arc of the Olympics. 

How does this represent "Excellence in Engagement"?

Excellence in sports media campaign design is measured by the cumulative effect of a design system applied at every level of coverage. Beautifully-designed individual assets create moments; a well-built identity system creates a relationship between a brand and its audience, one that resonates across every touchpoint, every platform, and every interaction.

Yahoo Sports’ visual direction for the Olympics was built with that relationship as its central mission. We made every creative decision to deliver immediate visual clarity and a strong, confident brand impression. In high-velocity content spaces, design that communicates with precision and authority drives meaningful and memorable audience engagement. This system delivered on that. 

Objective

Yahoo Sports is a sports media brand with unique editorial depth and reach, which enables it to cover major events such as the Olympics comprehensively across multiple formats (i.e. written editorial, video, etc.) and platforms (on-site, in-app, social media, YouTube, etc.). The Olympics presented an opportunity to build a branding system that would work across every format and platform.

The team set a high creative bar for the identity itself. The objective: create a system with an elevated tone that reflected the caliber of Yahoo Sports journalism and the significance of the event it was built to serve. Further, the team aimed to create something not just functional but visually distinguished; equally striking as it was adaptable. 

Strategy & Execution

Social media templates were developed months prior to the competition. We focused on building the efficiency needed for live event coverage while preserving creative standards. The team prioritized building the foundational design through-lines that would inform every piece of content produced throughout. 

The look was built around the powerful key image of snow-covered mountains, thoughtfully treated and shaped to allow the rest of the art to bloom from it. Its utility was an asset that could be used across multiple crops, positions, and viewpoints in both templated and organic art. Topography line overlays were chosen as an accent, a nod to the winding paths around the hilly passes. 

Typography functioned as the expressive element of the identity. Marrying script and modern sans typefaces provided a look both modern and timeless. We designed the information layout and visual hierarchy for breathability and clarity, ensuring reliability at every scale. 

Nominations

• Best Graphic Art or Design

Organizations

• Yahoo Sports

Links

•   Website

Credits

Amber Matsumoto
Senior Director of Content Design
Yahoo Sports

Mallory Bielecki
Senior Designer
Yahoo Sports

Gurkan Erdemli
Senior Motion Designer
Yahoo Sports

Shirley Hsia
Motion Designer
Yahoo Sports

Michael Wagstaffe
Social Video Designer
Yahoo Sports

Hassan Ahmad
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Hayden Hodge
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Davis Long
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Amy Monks
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Bruno Rouby
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Henry Russell
Designer
Yahoo Sports

Grant Thomas
Editorial Design Manager
Yahoo Sports

Taylor Wilhelm
Designer
Yahoo Sports