Upian has been supporting L’Équipe with consulting, graphics and interface design since 2012.
November 2022, the World Cup in Qatar has been underway for 4 days. L’Équipe’s website and app total 46 million unique visits, with over 281 million page views. These figures reflect the audience dynamics of recent years: an impressive volume, with steady growth in both consultations and subscriptions.
Here’s a look back at a decade-long, extraordinary collaboration that plays a central role in Upian’s projects.
A close collaboration
Since 2012, Upian has been working on a daily basis with L’Équipe on all digital subjects. Today, four designers work on the newspaper’s premises or remotely, integrated within the processes and using L’Équipe’s communication tools: Slack, Confluence, Jira, weekly briefings, etc. This close integration, orchestrated by product owners, managers and chief product officer, enables us to adapt to both long and short production times.
Designers remain in constant contact with developers. From the genesis of a Jira ticket to its realization, from the design of prospective mock-ups to acceptance testing on the eve of a launch.
At the same time, the design team, made up for the most part of Upian permanent staff, continues to work on other creative projects. This versatility enables the team to continually enrich its critical view of its own work, share its achievements and pool its know-how. It’s not unusual to see a motion designer involved in finalizing a demo for a new interface, or to benefit from an illustrator’s original drawings for a subscription campaign.
Close to users
L’Équipe keeps in regular contact with its audience, thanks to its research department, which meets with subscribers and occasional readers, young and old alike. At the same time, user testing is systematically integrated into the design process, from project genesis to the creation of functional prototypes. Here, graphic design plays its role as a mediator: whether it’s to promote editorial and commercial ideas or to create user-testing paths.
An industrial approach
This optimization of the work processes of L’Équipe’s product teams is reflected in the quest for ever more efficient design organization. Figma software plays a key role in the creation of mock-ups, their continuous improvement, the production of prototypes and their delivery to developers.
From interface design to the creation of visuals for L’Équipe explore and social networks, journalists and developers have access to the majority of digital mock-ups and creatives. This fluidity allows a clear and unique graphic direction to emerge. A vision embodied by an in-house designer and a product team, guarantors of the unique brand, who orchestrate graphic production.
From interface design to the creation of visuals for L’Équipe explore and social networks, journalists and developers have access to most digital mock-ups and creatives. This fluidity allows a clear and unique graphic direction to emerge. A vision embodied by an in-house designer and a product team, guarantors of the unique brand, who orchestrate graphic production.
Travelling through time
We set up regular visual watches. These UX and UI explorations, brought together in presentations for each project, help us to better understand future contemporary issues, and also to introduce and acculturate our in-house teams to digital design.
Added to this is the immense legacy of graphic design work begun over ten years ago. A multitude of mock-ups, sketches and projects, sometimes in contradictory directions (but always ambitious), are regularly recalled. This exploration of the past, an essential lesson in humility, constantly feeds the aspirations and creativity of the designers at L’Équipe.
