Volta Management

Volta had an opportunity to connect grassroots players with professional pathways, but its lack of a digital presence created a credibility gap.

The design challenge was finding the middle ground and we couldn’t create two separate brands. We needed one system that could speak differently depending on who was looking at it.

I led the team through a process that started with understanding the category and ended with a complete brand and digital experience.

Before designing the identity or interface, we looked at how established football organisations communicate their pathways, methodology and credibility online. We analysed organisations including:

City Football Group

Strong institutional presence, clear pathways, facilities and structured player/academy information.

Borussia Dortmund / BVA

Successfully connects grassroots programmes with elite youth development and creates a clear sense of progression.

Ajax Youth Academy

Leads with philosophy, methodology and development while establishing credibility through its approach to player development.

The Gap:

Volta had the opportunity to combine all three: the credibility of a structured organisation, the aspiration of a player journey, and a clear development methodology, without feeling like another generic football consultancy.

Volta already had a 5-Star Player Model that represented its approach to developing talent. Instead of treating this as a marketing copy and placing it somewhere deep in the website, I made a strategic decision that the methodology would become the information architecture.

Each pillar became a structural part of the experience. This meant that the brand’s philosophy wasn’t something users just read, it became something they could navigate.

This was one of the most important decisions in the project because it connected Brand strategy → UX strategy → Information architecture into one system.

This created a journey from: Purpose → People → Methodology → Proof

After establishing the structure, the team created low-fidelity wireframes before moving into the visuals.

We then refined the experience in Figma and conducted two informal user walkthroughs, using feedback from users and the client to iterate the hierarchy and flow.

Once the structure worked, I led the visual direction and finalised the brand system. The visual identity needed to occupy an interesting space, it couldn’t feel like a traditional corporate consultancy but it also couldn’t look like a football fan site.

The goal was to establish the organisation’s ambition immediately instead of making users search for what Volta actually does.

The About section turns abstract brand statements into something that is tangible. “The Road Ahead” provides potential players and families a clearer understanding of where Volta is going and how the organisation intends to get there. This was particularly important for a brand without an established digital reputation.

We introduced the people behind Volta to humanise the organisation. For a young player or family considering a professional pathway, knowing who is responsible for that journey is an important trust signal. The team page therefore became more than a company bio, it became part of the credibility architecture.

The Alumni / Successes section provides social proof, instead of saying Volta develops successful players, the experience gives users evidence through player outcomes and statistics.

This was an important principle throughout the experience:

Don’t just tell users to trust the organisation. Give them reasons to.

I led a four-person design team and was responsible for bringing the project together from strategy through final design.

My responsibilities included:

This project gave Volta something it didn’t have before and that is a credible digital identity and a structured experience for turning interest into trust. The impact wasn’t just creating a polished website, we created a system that helped Volta communicate who they are, how they develop players, who is behind the organisation, and evidence that their approach works.

The competitor research directly influenced that outcome. Instead of attempting to imitate the visual language of established football organisations, we identified the trust mechanisms behind their experiences and translated those principles into something appropriate for an emerging organisation.

The result connected: Brand → UX → Content → Methodology → Proof into one coherent experience.