CBS Sports, ESPN Team Up for New ‘Fresh and Youthful’ PGA Championship Graphics Package

The new look expands the event's core navy blue and gold color palette and adds a new ‘mulligan mint’ accent

Since ESPN returned to live coverage of the PGA Championship in 2020 after a 30-year absence, it has worked closely with fellow rightsholder CBS Sports to create a more unified, holistic look in its broadcasts. Those efforts take the next step this week as CBS Sports and ESPN launch a new PGA Championship-specific graphics package designed in partnership with the PGA of America and Two Fresh Creative. The graphics redesign for both CBS and ESPN broadcasts incorporate golf course-inspired contour lines and speak to a more youthful, dynamic identity.

“From a design standpoint, the sensibilities of this particular package are fresh and youthful,” says CBS Sports Art Director Komal Bhukhanwala. “Over the last few years, the PGA brand has consciously made more of an effort to attract a younger audience, so we started with that as our North Star. We wanted to bring that youthfulness and into this package and I think we’ve been pretty successful.”

The new look also expands the core navy blue and gold color palette synonymous with the PGA Championship, while adding in what is being dubbed a new ‘mulligan mint’ accent.

The previous graphics package was seven years old and was designed prior to ESPN’s arrival on the scene when Turner Sports (now WBD Sports) handled the Thursday/Friday broadcasts. In those days, two wholly unique graphics packages were used: one for Thursday/Friday on TNT and one for Saturday/Sunday on ESPN. When ESPN took over the rights in 2020, CBS’s existing package was adapted to incorporate ESPN branding and used during all four rounds.

“The goal of this package was to make it more holistic so it was inclusive of both ESPN and CBS, while also centering on the branding of the PGA [of America] and the PGA Championship,” says JP LoMonaco, VP On-Air Graphics & Design, CBS Sports. “So for a variety of factors, we felt this was an ideal time to [design a new package]. And the PGA [of America] was open to and excited about all of this because they wanted to connect with and talk to a younger and more diverse audience.”

Over the past two years, CBS Sports and ESPN have worked closely to revamp the insert package to make it more brand agnostic and embrace the palette of the PGA Championship logo. The constant leaderboard had also been built out previously for CBS Sports’ overall golf coverage. This allowed the CBS and ESPN creative teams to turn their entire focus to the redesigning animations and wraparounds.

“We put already put the work in under the hood in the inserts and the reskin, so we didn’t have to touch that this year,” says LoMonaco. “That gave us a lot of freedom just to play with the wraparounds.”

Creative agency Two Fresh Creative was selected to help spearhead the project and the trio of design teams were off and running with LoMonaco and Bhukhanwala leading up the CBS side and Creative Directors Tim O’Shaughnessy and Lucas Nickerson leading the ESPN side.

“This was an incredibly positive experience, mainly because the foundation between the creative leadership of Lucas, me, Komal, and JP was already very strong,” says O’Shaughnessy. “That gave us a head start in terms of how we could speak to the creative and how we could partner to come up with the same agreed upon philosophies. In terms of making this project work with two different networks, I think enjoying your collaborators is a really big part of it. And honestly, the experience was as rewarding as the product because it was a lot of fun to work together.”

LoMonaco seconds that sentiment, saying “When first reached out to Tim and Lucas to talk about how to approach this project we all knew it was going deep creative dive and it wasn’t just like fixing some a few [elements] that already existed. I think both sides were very excited at the opportunity to finally work together since we had spent so much time together talking shop over the years. It was very cool to find out each other’s processes and I think both sides learned a lot along the way. We got a little bit of a peak behind the curtain at how things work on the other side and we were able to find a common space to work collaboratively together and come up with a really great product.”

The majority of the package was built with Maxon’s Cinema4D and Adobe AfterEffects software. Two Fresh Creative Director Phil Guthrie and his team were in charge of bringing CBS and ESPN’s respective visions to life.

“Two Fresh is a great company to work with and they did a great job of serving as the middleman of these conversations and producing work that hit all the right notes,” says LoMonaco. “It’s not easy to work with two major networks that are collaborating together on a graphics package, but they pulled it off.”

With the package now launched on-air, CBS and ESPN are looking ahead and O’Shaughnessy believes that the unique youth-oriented take on golf for this year’s tournament could provide a roadmap to make golf more modern moving forward.

“Our objective from the start was to try something that was considered adventurous for golf, which was giving it a more youthful energy and a modern flair.” says O’Shaughnessy. “We wanted to take the traditional tone and vibe that you feel in golf looks, which is particularly smooth and flowing, and modify it so it felt more modern. I don’t think we made it too adventurous for the [average] golf fan, but we definitely clicked it up a few notches from where it was before. I think sets us up to the next go around to do something that could be even more adventurous and outside of our safe space creatively.”

CLICK HERE for SVG’s in-depth coverage of CBS Sports and ESPN’s production of the 2023 PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, NY.