Huntington: launching a national golf platform, one section at a time

Huntington Bank launched a new golf initiative built around World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and its sponsorship of PGA TOUR University. I took it from idea to launch — design and art direction through build in Sitecore — working with brand, legal, and compliance the whole way, against a deadline that was set by other people's contracts.

The challenge

A bank does not get to announce a sponsorship whenever the website is ready. The announcement date is fixed by the agreement, the same date the athlete's team is working toward, and the page has to be live and correct on that morning.

That is a different problem from a normal launch. Most web work lets you cut scope and ship the rest later. Here the scope was set by what had been signed, and the schedule was set by when it could be said out loud.

The Huntington golf platform hero with its tagline and call to action — The Craft of Golf Meets the Craft of Money — the line the whole platform hangs on, and the one route into the ambassador roster.

Working the constraint instead of fighting it

The answer was to stop treating it as one launch. Rights cleared in stages, so the platform shipped in stages — each section built, reviewed, and staged ahead of the date it was allowed to go live, then released on that date.

That meant the page had to be designed so that a section could be absent without the page looking broken. A hero that works alone. An ambassador grid that reads correctly with four cards or with twenty. A sponsorship module that stands on its own. Every section had to be complete in itself, because for a while some of them were the only thing there.

The PGA TOUR University sponsorship module — The PGA TOUR University module. Built to stand alone — it went live on its own schedule, not the page's.

Brand, legal, and compliance in the room

Everything on a bank's site carries review. Athlete likeness, sponsorship language, and program descriptions carry more of it than most. The work was not writing copy and then sending it to legal; it was building with the constraints already in the layout — space for the disclosures, naming that matched the agreements, imagery cleared for the use it was getting.

Getting that right in the first round is what made the pace possible. Review is fast when there is nothing to argue about.

The Team Huntington Ambassadors grid, led by Scottie Scheffler — The ambassador roster. Scheffler leads it, but the grid was built to grow — every card is the same object, so adding a player is content, not a redesign.

Built in Sitecore

The platform lives in Sitecore, which is the constraint that makes the staged release work. The sections are components, the roster is content, and adding an ambassador after launch does not require a developer or a release. That was the point: the initiative was always going to keep growing after the announcement, and it should not need me for it to.

The Huntington golf platform hero on a phone — The same hero on a phone. A section that has to survive being the only section also has to survive being 390px wide.

Why it matters

This is the shape of most real brand work inside a large regulated company. The interesting problem is almost never the visual one. It is that the thing has to be excellent, correct, and live on a date somebody else picked, with several teams who all have a legitimate veto.

The design answer was modularity — not as an architecture preference, but because it was the only structure that could absorb a schedule nobody controlled.