ESS Cup and Bay Area Surf Cup
Two tournament brands with completely different looks, running on one shared theme and restyled from the WordPress admin.
- Client
- ESS Cup and Bay Area Surf Cup
- Year
- 2026
- My role
- Design and WordPress development
- Work type
- UX/UI design, WordPress development
- Live site
- esscup.com
- On one shared theme
- 2 brands
- Brand color controls in the admin
- 12
The situation
ESS Cup is an elite youth soccer tournament whose winning team earns a trip to Barcelona. Bay Area Surf Cup is its West Coast sister event. Each needed to feel like its own brand, prestige for one and a West Coast mood for the other, while staying easy for the organizer to update between editions.
Building a separate theme for each event would have doubled the upkeep, so they had to share one codebase.
What I did
- Designed two distinct looks on the shared theme: palette, typography and mood for each event.
- Built a Theme Options panel with 12 brand color pickers, 6 for light mode and 6 for dark, so colors and type change from the WordPress admin.
- Overrode SCSS design tokens per site.
- Hero sections that take an image, a slideshow or self-hosted video.
- Age group blocks with format, fees and deadlines pulled from ACF, plus sponsors, an FAQ and registration calls to action.
