ICC Cricket World Cup 2019

Social media sports has grown in popularity, becoming the best place to stay informed about the latest news, tournament information and matchday activity. Prior to this tournament, cricket was not up to speed with this trend when compared to coverage published by competing sports such football, tennis and rugby.

It was the ICC’s goal to break new ground, offering their audience and followers creative social content throughout this tournament. LiveWire, who were the creative agency tasked with this project, hired me to work on the social media content after seeing my sports design work online.

The graphics that I delivered can be broken down into three main types of content, each of which offered its own unique challenges.

During the tournament, I created reactive graphics that were commissioned in response to key match events, milestones or highlight stats on a particular cricketer or team. These graphics were incredibly time sensitive; the sooner I delivered the final artwork, the more engagement the social media posts would receive.

I worked with a turnaround time of 1-3 hours from initial contact. This meant that the ICC was able to post match-reactive graphics that related to fixtures played on that day, increasing fan and follower engagement, along with engaging non-followers. These were designed to emphasise that the @ICC social media channels were the best place to keep up to date with all of the Cricket World Cup’s action.

Each reactive post was unique to whatever happened in the tournament, and each required different creative approaches when designing them. Examples include Ben Stokes’ unbelievable catch versus South Africa, Sheldon Cottrell’s army celebration, and Shikhar Dhawan’s incredible scoring record. I often sought to include team colours, hero images of the players and background images of fans to capture the tournament fever.