Fanzine Apps
From 2017–2025, I was the Lead UX/UI Designer at Fanzine. I helped build and evolve a white-label sports app platform used by 50+ football club fans, reaching over 5 million fans across iOS, Android, and web.
This wasn’t a single project — it was years of shipping features, modernising the product, building systems, and improving how millions of fans consumed football content.
MY ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer → Product Designer (6 Years)
METHODS USED
Research, Wireframes, UX Strategy, Prototyping, UI Design, Design System, User Testing, Delivery Support
The Core Challenge
Fanzine needed a scalable white-label platform that could support any football club—from Arsenal to smaller Championship sides—while still feeling bespoke. The goals were simple: launch new clubs fast, maintain consistent UX across 50+ apps, reduce design/engineering overhead, and deliver a product fans would use daily. This became the foundation for the design system.
Platform Architecture & UX Strategy
I began by researching competitor apps, fan behaviour, club workflows, and analytics across matchday vs non-matchday usage. The insights were clear: fans were jumping between platforms, clubs needed flexible branding without bespoke layouts, and engineering needed a stable, repeatable UI system. These findings shaped the core UX patterns used for the next 8 years.
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Content, Competitor & UX Analysis
We benchmarked leading sports apps (Premier League clubs, OneFootball, Fotmob, LiveScore, Sky Sports, ESPN, BBC Sport) to understand content structure, navigation, match journeys, and engagement triggers. This analysis informed our white-label framework and helped us launch themed apps significantly faster.
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Information Architecture & Wireframes
I created the full IA for Home, Explore, Matches, News, Videos, Podcast, Pick Your Team, and Shop. All wireframes were built with strict theming rules: layouts stayed consistent while branding swapped via tokens. This ensured scalability without redesigning screens for each club.
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The Design System
I designed a lightweight but scalable design system built around consistent typography, reusable icons, and a shared set of core controls. Each component followed strict theming rules so layouts stayed the same while colours, badges, and branding swapped per club. This approach allowed us to launch new teams quickly without redesigning screens, while keeping the entire platform visually consistent across 50+ apps.
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Branding Packs & Theming Workflow
Each club received a brand pack including colour tokens, logo rules, textures, background patterns, hero images, and icon styles. We refined this into a repeatable theming pipeline, allowing us to launch new clubs continuously with minimal design involvement.
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Major UX Feature
One of the most impactful features I designed was Pick Your Team — a pre-match personalisation flow that let fans create and share their ideal starting XI. I conceived the idea, mapped the UX logic, and delivered the full UI end-to-end alongside our PM and engineering team. Pick Your Team quickly became the platform’s highest-engagement feature, dominating our social channels every matchday and becoming the number one driver of new app downloads across all clubs. Its shareability, simplicity, and ritual-like behaviour turned it into a viral growth loop that consistently outperformed every other feature on the platform.
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Final UI Design
The final UI system delivered a consistent, modern experience across 50+ clubs while allowing full brand flexibility. Layouts, components, and interactions remained stable, while colours, badges, and theming swapped dynamically through tokens. This approach ensured visual consistency, reduced design overhead, and allowed us to launch new clubs quickly without redesigning screens. The result was a scalable, production-ready platform that felt unique to each club but unified across iOS and Android.
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Impact & Outcomes
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50+ apps live with ~800,000 downloads
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New clubs launched in hours, not days
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Visual inconsistencies removed across the portfolio
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Engineering needed only brand assets—not new screens
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System reused to prototype NFL apps with minimal changes
What I Learned
I learned that a strong design system becomes the product in a white-label environment. Consistency beats bespoke design, strict rules prevent scope creep, and data should drive iteration. Theming only works when layouts stay stable, and long-term scalability depends on reducing variation—not adding more.