Mike Tyson Invitational
Website design | Visual branding
2026
Mike Tyson Invitational is a first-year amateur boxing event in Las Vegas. I designed and built its ten-page site for four audiences at once, ticket buyers, fighters, sponsors and donors, and made a first edition look like it had been running for years.
Services:
Challenge:
Two moods that hate each other, and four audiences on one homepage.
Role:
I led the design end to end: the Iron Forge direction, the design system and all ten pages, built in Webflow, working with engineering, marketing and brand to a fixed launch date.
01
About
The work was never about layout, it was about holding heat and precision in one place without either going quiet.
Tyson's name on a poster does most of the selling. It also sets a bar: anything carrying it has to look like fight night in Las Vegas, not a campus event with a famous guest.
Ten pages had to sell tickets, register fighters, court sponsors and take donations, and four of them hand off to software someone else owns.
02
Details
- Surfaces
- 10 pages
- Typefaces
- Legend, Chakra Petch, IBM Plex Sans
Challenge
The concept was Iron Forge meets modern tech. Forge wants texture, heat and grit; tech wants cold, flat and exact. Turn both up and you get a mess with a fire filter over it.
Then a spectator, an amateur fighter, a sponsor and a donor all land on the same page, each wanting a different site. And this was edition one, with no last year to borrow credibility from.
Solution
I rationed one side instead of blending both: 65% near black, 25% smelting orange, never more than 10% cold teal. Once the split was a number, I could check a screen against it instead of arguing about it.
Texture lives only in artwork and headline fills. Buttons, forms and body copy stay flat, so the heat sits on a technical surface rather than as a filter over the page.
A sitemap gives each audience its own route off the homepage: tickets, registration, sponsorship and donations each land somewhere built for that one job.
03
Highlights
One homepage, four audiences
A spectator, a fighter, a sponsor and a donor land on the same page. I built it as a descent: heat at the top to sell the night, information in the middle, and four clear exits at the bottom so nobody hunts for their route.
Tech as a behaviour, not a colour
The hero is the whole thesis: near black, a headline in smelting red, one ember of heat on the right. I kept the tech half out of the palette and put it into the interaction instead, so the cursor is a glowing crosshair.
The date reveal is where the two meet: brushed metal for the forge, corner brackets for the HUD. It is the frame I am happiest with.
Teal only where the copy is about technology
Cold teal runs in one place: the section on AI broadcast and real-time power measurement. Keeping it there means the palette itself tells you the subject changed.
The navigation became a full-screen portal because Buy Tickets and Registration have no natural ranking, and a horizontal bar would have had to invent one.
Legacy without the highlight reel
A montage of famous knockouts is someone else's story, and it does not explain why an amateur invitational exists. The page runs on one line instead: legacy did not end in the ring, it continued through transformation.
Sale status before the handoff
Ticketing belongs to TicketTailor, so my job ended at the handoff. I put each night's sale status on the page before the jump, so nobody reaches an external checkout to find their night is not on sale yet.
The most restrained page is the pitch
Every other page talks to someone who wants to watch a fight. This one talks to someone with a marketing budget, so I traded the atmosphere for structure and numbers.
04
What I tried
Finding a face that could throw a punch
I made four boards to find how far the forge could go before it stopped looking like a sport and started looking like a filter.
01 · Forge, on a componentThe heat tested on a real card rather than a headline: ember rail, cut corners, a stamped date. Three densities of the same component, because the one carrying body copy is the one that has to survive.
02 · Cold, atmosphericThe opposite pole. Photography pushed nearly to black, teal numerals, no orange anywhere. Calm and expensive: and nothing in it throws a punch.
03 · Lit portraitChosenA fighter carrying the heat instead of a texture doing it. This layout is what shipped: headline and body left, the figure right, Tickets solid against Explore outlined. The cold blue accent is the one thing that did not survive the palette ratio.
04 · Flat graphicThe tech pole with the photography removed entirely: shards, a trajectory line, a circled node. It reads like a product launch, not a fight card.05
The system
One palette, rationed
The palette is a budget. The percentages do the work, not the hex values.
06
What it taught me
What a first big one teaches you
A ratio is a design decision
Writing 65 / 25 / 10 beside the palettes did more than any single colour choice. Once one direction was rationed the two stopped clashing, and a written number let me tell a screen was wrong instead of just feeling it.
Scope integrations before designing around them
The pages that went smoothly were the ones where I knew the checkout belonged to someone else. The ones that hurt were where I had already drawn one.
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