About the Author:
DD.NYC® Creative Director & Managing Partner Anjelika Lours’ Kour specializes in corporate branding, web design, and video storytelling. Beyond working with powerhouse clients, she actively shapes the wider creative industry as a global judge for the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) and the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
We were tasked to build the FIFA World Cup 2026™ NYNJ official website in time for the world’s biggest sporting event, back in the US for the first time since ‘94.
DD.NYC® became the Digital Agency of Record for the Host Committee, which meant the site wasn’t a marketing add-on. It was the front door where fans, sponsors, media, and partners from every part of the world would go to understand what this region was bringing to the tournament.
The brief had a built-in tension we knew we’d be working against from day one. The site had to feel unmistakably global, because billions of people were going to see it, and unmistakably local, because it represented one specific region and had to earn its place next to every other host city in the world.
I’ll give you an overview of how our web designers approached the project and what became our winning strategy.
Making a sports website award-worthy and utilitarian
We needed the site to be two things: award-worthy and utilitarian. But they don’t always result from the same process.
Award-worthy, because a project this visible was always going to be judged against the best design work in the world, apart from other sports websites.
Utilitarian, because it had to perform. Mobile-first, fast under real traffic, legible across languages and devices, built for an audience that would be arriving from everywhere at once.
Those two goals pull in different directions. Bold, ownable design decisions can slow a site down or complicate a build. A build optimized purely for speed and scale can end up looking generic.
Then there was the scale of who we were working with. FIFA and a Host Committee aren’t a typical client relationship. There are more stakeholders, approval layers, and a brand system that has to answer to an organization operating at a global level. That kind of structure changes the rhythm of a project before a single pixel gets designed.
All of that is part of why this became one of the most demanding projects we’ve taken on as an agency. By the time we wrapped, we’d put in roughly a multiple of hours we’d typically spend on a project of this type. It’s a clear marker of how much the scope and complexity grew once we were fully inside it.
Design teams brought together by one goal
Instead of assigning to a chosen few, we opened it up to our entire design staff. Anyone who wanted to contribute to something this high-profile could put their hand up and get involved, rather than the work being routed to a small, fixed pod the way most projects are staffed.
For a milestone project landing in our 10th year as an agency, that felt like the right call. This was the kind of work our whole team should get to be part of, not just a handful of people.
That approach also matched the nature of the brief. A project asking us to represent an entire region, for an audience of billions, benefited from more perspectives in the room. It meant more ideas got tested, more instincts got compared against each other, and the final direction had been stress-tested by a wider group before it ever reached the client.
The other deliberate choice was to let history do some of the design work. Rather than building the visual system from a blank page, the team went back and looked at how past World Cups and host cities had approached their own identity and design language.
That research became part of the foundation. Something we used to understand what had worked, what had felt dated fast, and where there was room to do something the tournament hadn’t quite seen from a host city before.
The result merges FIFA’s global brand language with the identity of the New York/New Jersey region, built mobile-first from the ground up to handle real-world scale.
Celebrating wins and milestones
The site launched as a mobile-first build designed to hold up under serious global traffic, with a design system built to carry FIFA’s global brand alongside the region’s own identity across every device and screen size.
Since launch, it’s been recognized across the digital design community: an Awwwards Honorable Mention, a Special Kudos from CSS Design Awards, and a feature in the One Page Love Inspiration Collection. It also picked up wins in the Q3 2025 Online Design Awards Competition, including a Studio/Agency win in Brand Collateral and a Gold in Website Design.
We’re thankful for the recognition but more so on what the project meant to us. It landed in our first decade as an agency, and it’s the kind of project that tests whether everything you’ve built actually holds up when the stakes are this visible.
Opening the work to the whole team, going back into design history instead of skipping it, and being honest with ourselves about how much time a project like this actually takes were the choices that got us there, more than any single design decision on the page.
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