FIFA WORLD CUP 2026™

When Balich Wonder Studio called up NorthHouse for another collaboration, they tasked them with designing stadium-screen visuals and broadcast countdown sequences for six unique ceremonies at the world’s most-watched sporting event, the FIFA World Cup 2026™. Throughout the Opening Ceremonies in Mexico City, Toronto, and Los Angeles; the 250th-anniversary Independence Day celebrations in Philadelphia and Houston; and the Closing Ceremony at MetLife Stadium, the challenge was one of scale and identity.

Each ceremony needed its own signature stamp while feeling part of one shared celebration, and the NorthHouse team delivered across six stadiums in six weeks. More than a hundred LED surfaces, from large-format displays to SoFi Stadium's 360-degree Oculus, had their own formats, resolutions, and viewing distances.

Rather than adapting a single visual design across venues, NorthHouse created visuals for each location. They drew on colours, patterns, symbols, and textures of each host nation and designed around each venue's architecture, with a dedicated Protocol and Flag of Nations identity tying most ceremonies together. Working with the lighting team, they coordinated visual cues with key musical moments, keeping the performers at centre stage.

With an in-house render farm and custom automation tools that checked frame rates, resolutions, and codecs across hundreds of deliverables, the team brought in Notch 2026.2 for key moments that called for greater visual impact. Among them, in the US opening ceremonies, Notch’s particle system turned the stars of the American flag into a dynamic visual language: shimmering typography, vast cosmic starfields and atmospheric effects flowing across multiple LED surfaces, woven into the bold red, white and blue art direction.

The result gave each stadium its own atmosphere, all within one global celebration of sport.