FIFA World Cup 2026
EPICENTER OF SOCCER

When crowds hesitate, movement becomes risk.

When the match ends, the real test begins. Crowds pour out of the stadium toward MARTA, downtown, parking, and the fan festival all at once, part of the 300,000+ visitors Atlanta expects across the tournament. In a crowd this dense, a single moment of hesitation doesn't stay personal. It becomes a bottleneck that spreads, slowing everyone and raising the safety risk. The job was a wayfinding system that kept people moving with confidence before congestion could form.

THE CHALLENGE

Moving a city's worth of people through downtown is a crowd-management problem before it's a navigation one. Traditional wayfinding leans on scattered signs that assume you already know the area. For World Cup visitors who've never set foot in Atlanta, every intersection is a place to pause, and every pause is a place congestion can start. The system had to be clear, scalable, and fast to read, cutting decisions down so foot traffic kept flowing.

Aerial view of a downtown Atlanta intersection with a Journey to the Epicenter World Cup ground graphic

INSIGHT

Crowds don't move as one mass. They move through thousands of individual decisions, all made at the same moment. When each decision is effortless, movement feels continuous. When even a few people hesitate, the congestion spreads. So the goal wasn't to give people more directions; it was to remove the uncertainty before anyone had to stop and think.

SOLUTION

Journey to the Epicenter is a modular wayfinding and experiential identity system that turns the walk from the stadium into a guided route. One visual language runs across every physical touchpoint: directional totems, signposts, banners, pavement graphics, scrims, portable flags. Bold directional cues and a modular kit let the system scale from a major intersection down to a single decision point, staying legible from across the street.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

The system removes choices instead of piling on information. At each decision point, a visitor meets one direction, one destination, one walking time, not a wall of competing messages. Graphics sit where people naturally slow or pause, so guidance shows up exactly when a decision is due. High-contrast visuals and large-scale type let it all register at a glance, while someone's still walking. The system doesn't just mark where things are. It moves the crowd.

IMPACT

A comprehensive wayfinding strategy for the Metro Atlanta Chamber's FIFA World Cup 2026 last-mile experience, built to move 300,000+ visitors through Atlanta's post-match pedestrian network. The system shows how environmental branding, wayfinding, and experiential design can work as one, improving crowd flow, cutting hesitation, and holding a single visitor experience across a string of destinations.

ROLE & CONTRIBUTION

• Designed "Epicenter of Soccer," the wayfinding and experiential system that won selection over 10 competing concepts and was installed along Atlanta's last-mile route to Mercedes-Benz Stadium for the FIFA World Cup 2026.

•Designed the modular identity system carrying that route across out-of-home, social, and digital, sized for the 300,000+ visitors the Chamber projected, by mapping 6 visitor segments into the journey maps that drove every crowd-flow and wayfinding decision.