Responses by Rareview.

Background: We made this project purely for entertainment. A few of us here at Rareview love baseball, so we wanted to do something fun using that theme. We had been wanting to try Webflow and thought it’d be great to use our passion for the game of baseball to write some content about the sport, then use Webflow to build it with some exciting animation. Our intended audience is any sports fan, designer or developer, but we suspect that anyone who likes digital art will find The Pitch stimulating.

Design core: The intention behind the aesthetics was to create a vintage style that highlighted the history of baseball. To accomplish this, we started by creating our own 3-D baseball. From there, the design started to take shape when we introduced a background texture to the site and stitching around images. We’ve purposefully chosen some vibrant colors and images that pop off the more muted vintage design, and two typefaces add visual interest. The content development for The Pitch was aimed at telling a story about the 2022 season, including which baseball cards are currently the most popular, what the odds are for playoff contention and highlights some recent headlines.

Favorite details: In the Cards to Buy section, we wanted to create our own baseball cards. We drew inspiration from the old Topps cards, bringing in a similar wood texture to the outer edge of the card. We used solid colors for the names and added a floating logo for the team. When you hover over it, the card moves slightly to give the user a quick three-dimensional feel. As a team, we love this section. Additionally, the Predictions section is also a fun, interesting way to represent October baseball visually.

Time constraints: This project took around two months to conceptualize, write, design and build. As we were in the process of development, some of the headlines and stats likely changed. Due to our budget for this project and the timeline we established up front, we didn’t have any time left to update all the odds and predictions right before we pushed the site live. Our goal was to launch in August so we’d have all of September to share the site before MLB starts playoffs in October. We hit our goal, but there may be a few stats that have changed along the way—since we are not using an API to build the content dynamically.

Technology: We used Figma to design The Pitch and Webflow to build this project. Webflow is relatively new to our team, and we have intended to build something with it for a while. When this idea surfaced, we felt it was a natural fit. It took extra time to learn how to do certain things, add animations and get the mobile experience correct. For our first project in Webflow, we’re pleased with the end result.