Card Design & Automation: Bolla

A few weeks into joining SPODIO, we identified visual appeal as a critical factor of growth for our products, as the company was repositioning itself to serve the hype/streetwear audience. We wanted to harness high-impact visuals and guide them toward bets that would interest them. We started exploring what this could look like in early iterations of what ended up being the Snapbet feature.

At the same time, digital collectibles were starting to catch fire - NFTs were hot, especially in the sports space, with companies like NBA Top Shot and Sorare exploding into the scene. We used that as inspiration for the initial iteration of Snapbet, and invoked sports card designs for our visuals. Since we needed the cards to support their associated bets, we heavily relied on sports team colors to make bets more identifiable. We also added graffiti treatment for the key art reminiscent of street culture.

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While we manually built the initial batch of cards, it became apparent that supporting the entire universe of bets would be a nigh impossible task. The sheer scale of cards needed and the time required to produce them meant design resources were becoming a bottleneck. This is the moment we turned to automation. Working with our data science and engineering team, we built Card Manager, an internal tool that aimed to speed up card minting 50x. The main feature of Card Manager is the key art selector: using AI to parse and analyze millions of images on the web, Card Manager can surface and isolate images that correspond to the required criteria (single person in the picture, specific expressions, face visible, etc), and inject key art into particular templates.

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By doing so, we significantly reduced the resources needed for card creation while improving volume and speed by multiples. As a result, in less than two weeks, we produced cards for the entire NBA, NFL, NHL, ten soccer leagues, UFC, and men's and women's tennis.

Card Manager is currently in development.

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