Responses by Athletics.

Background: &friends is a digital archive built to document and celebrate New York City’s soccer scene—the pickup games, leagues, clubs, rivalries and characters that play out across the five boroughs. The primary audience is that community itself: the players and teams who rarely see their own culture recorded anywhere. A secondary audience is the wider design, sport and culture crowd drawn in by the storytelling. It’s less a one-off campaign than an ongoing, living Athletics project, with the site as its central hub, supported by partners like NYC Footy and Dress Code and extended through Instagram at instagram.com/andfriends_nyc.

Design core: The identity runs on one electric move—a fluorescent yellow (#EAFF00) against black, paired with editorial typography that italicizes the words that matter. With scrolling hero galleries of kits, players and pitches, the site leads with photography punctuated by looping text marquees ("No Sponsors / No Problem / No Turf") that carry a punk, zine-like, jumpers-for-goalposts energy. Structurally, the core is three things: a Teams directory (the archive itself), an About manifesto and an unusually rich Submit Your Team form.

Favorite details: That submission form. Instead of dry fields, it asks what keeps the team together “besides the group chat,” their greatest rivals, team anthem and best post-game snack “for research purposes.” It turns data entry into storytelling and makes every contributor part of the archive’s voice, which is the entire point of the project.

Navigation structure: We kept it deliberately minimal. The archive gets you right to the teams or where you get your team in. The scrolling marquees double as both motion and wayfinding energy, giving the site rhythm without cluttering the actual navigation.

Technology: The site is built on Next.js (App Router) and leans heavily on Next/Image for the photographic galleries. Automatic optimization keeps large imagery sharp but fast-loading. It’s deployed on our own infrastructure, with SVG-driven branding so logos stay crisp at any scale, and a fully responsive layout. The Sign Up form supports multifile media uploads up to 100MB and ten files per field, so teams can send photos, kit shots and video, the pipeline that lets the archive grow outward from the community itself.