I Wanted This to Exist

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Three screens from the site in dark mode: the week's games, Dallas at Green Bay with the forecast, and New England at Buffalo after the final.

Before an NFL Sunday I always had the same few questions. Who plays when, where can I watch? Anyone hurt? What kind of trajectory are these teams on currently? How do these two teams actually match up? And that doesn't even touch what I'm looking for post game. The answers were out there, but spread across sites and apps where I had to duck around ads, network promos and betting offers to find them.

I wanted one place that answered all of it, laid out so I could read it in a glance. I'd had this desire knocking around in the back of my head for years. What I didn't have was a way to build it. I'm a designer, not a programmer.

But now I've finally found a coding partner: Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool. So while I worked out what the site is, how it works, which information matters most, where it goes and what it looks like, Claude went and wrote the code. I'd design and wireframe a screen, review what came back, and send back notes and corrected screenshots until it was right.

01 ⦵ Start with the questions

Every screen is built around something I actually wanted to know.

Before a game, that's kickoff time, broadcast, weather, injuries, and how each offense stacks up against the other team's defense. After a game, it's the score, who led, and where the game was won. Those questions became three layers. The week shows every game. A matchup answers the big questions on four cards. Any card opens into the detail behind it. You can stay at the top or go as deep as you like, and nothing gets in the way.

Three layers of the site: the week's games, one matchup's game info, and the key matchups behind it.

02 ⦵ One screen, one shot

The condensed views went through more rounds than anything else on the site.

Nearly every page has a condensed version: the whole week, or a whole matchup, on one screen with nothing to scroll. I designed, redid and re-laid out these more than any other part of the site. A week can have one game or sixteen. A team can have no injuries or a long list. The page has to hold all of it and still read in one look, with everything you need for that moment at the highest level. When it works, you don't scroll and you don't search. You just look.

Three condensed screens: the whole week, Buffalo at the Rams before kickoff, and New England at Buffalo after the final.

03 ⦵ Recognizable, not copied

A helmet doesn't have to match to be unmistakable.

I didn't want to use team logos, so I drew one helmet and gave every team its own version of it. The shell, facemask and accent piece each take a team color, which I picked by hand for all 32 teams, then shaded so it reads like a real helmet. None truly copy a team's actual helmet, and some look nothing like it, yet they're still recognizable in light mode or dark. Most people won't notice how long I spent getting those color combinations correct. They'd notice if one were wrong.

All 32 team helmets, half on a light background and half on a dark one, each labeled with its team code.

04 ⦵ Every icon, drawn by hand

Every icon on the site speaks the same visual language.

Using custom icons mattered to me. A generic set could have worked, but it wouldn't have felt like it belonged to football or to this site. So I designed them myself: the football that marks game info, the clipboard for matchups, the field for kickoff, a stadium for every kind of roof, and a full set for passing, rushing, receiving, defense, kicking and returns.

From the card icons down to the weather and the menu, every one follows the same rules: bold, simple shapes that stay clear at small sizes. They also do a job. Each icon leads its card's title and sits in the navigation down the side of the page, so you can tell where you are without reading a word.

Forty icons from the site, grouped in rows: cards, team, player stats, stadiums, weather, menu and markers.

05 ⦵ When I stopped double-checking

It felt real the first time I trusted it.

For weeks I checked the site against everything: scores, injuries, ranks, stats. I also planned for the moments when the data goes sideways. A finished game keeps the weather it was played in. When the official injury designations are late, the practice report fills in until they arrive. A player who sits out is marked inactive once the game is over.

Then one day I wanted to know who was top five in receiving yards, and I opened my own site to find out. Something in that list surprised me, and for the first time I didn't go check it somewhere else. I trusted it. That's when it stopped being a project and became something I use.