Designing Broadcast Graphics for a Cricket League

This is where my game modding turned into real design work.

Before any of it was broadcast design, it was modding. On PlanetCricket.org, a forum built around the video game Cricket 07 by EA Sports, I used to design scoreboard overlays, kits, stadium adboards: the visual layer of a game that hadn’t been updated in years but still had a community keeping it alive. I got good enough at it to become a reputable member there, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realise it was one of the first places I built something that people actually used and judged.

That skill sat mostly dormant until it found a real use case. A few friends and I started hosting cricket matches in our city, we called the whole thing Sharjah League Cricket (SLC), and between 2016 and 2021 we ran approximately 90 games. Running it was its own logistical exercise: coordinating 22 players a match, sorting equipment, recording the toss and post-match summary sequences, beverages and sometimes even a meal after. None of that is design work, but it’s the reason the design work exists.

We were tracking live scores on a mobile app, and once a match ended, that data just sat there unless we did something with it. Posting a screenshot of a scoring app to our WhatsApp group felt like underselling what had just happened. So I started building broadcast-style packages (sets of on-screen graphics like the ones on a TV cricket broadcast) to present it properly — match summaries, batting and bowling cards, player profiles, the kind of overlays you’d actually see on a TV cricket broadcast.

Over time this turned into 21 separate packages, each styled for a different tournament or broadcaster aesthetic, all built in Adobe Photoshop. These are unofficial designs made for our own league, and aren’t affiliated with the teams or tournaments shown.

It expanded past cricket too, with a handful of football packages (line-up and squad graphics) made from the same instinct: turn something casual into something that looks like it belongs on screen.

Every package uses the same layer structure across all 21 templates, so each one could take new player names and scores on short notice after a match. I planned it that way from the start.