GameSpot • 2022
GameSpot Best of the Year 2022
Role(s): Lead Designer, Art Director
Every year GameSpot puts together an end of year editorial event covering the best games, movies, tv and entertainment that was released. The team looks to make it one of their preeminent editorial features of the year and make GameSpot and the year's best releases shine as a result
My Responsibilities:
• Best of 2022 logo
• Thumbnail design strategy/execution
• Motion graphics art direction
• Promotional design strategy/execution
As with any end of year coverage, one of the biggest issues is representing a wide range of content types within a singular design and making sure they don’t clash or look overly busy. Another challenge is making the coverage feel prestigious or award-like
With this coverage for GameSpot i wanted to approach it with something bold and very graphic, something that would catch an eye as you’re browsing through many of the end of year events. Utilizing heavy serifed fonts and bold graphic elements i mixed in a CRT and glitchy aesthetic to speak to the medium this entertainment usually lives in
a more angular and cleaner version of a best of event
Early Style Explorations
With this year there was a distinct direction choice compared to what could have been. As shown above, i had established an alternate style early on that looked clean, offered nice geometric crops and allowed for easy templates. Yet still something didn’t feel interesting enough about it and the stakeholders also much preferred a direction that felt more organic and less traditional.
explorations for the ripped paper style
alternate paper rip exploration for the cover thumbnail
Defining The Style
The choice to use paper rips for the crops came from a discussion of myself and Andrew Crosby (Social Designer for GameSpot) who then went to scan rips he had made for us to utilize in these assets for the real thing which you'll see below. My initial style pitch here shows the near final state of utilizing collage but adding a maximalist approach without hopefully overpowering the brand/event
motion graphics sampling
Motion Graphics
The motion style i was looking to achieve with these was something that was a mix of glitchy, staccato and a little chaotic. I worked with our motion designer and provided reference to what i was looking to achieve and he absolutely nailed it in every way
a few thumbnail examples
Thumbnails
I wanted the thumbnails to have a strong typographic presence while still maintaining the look of the collaged, paper ripped style i had established. It was also important for me to feature the category for each video/article as a way for people to understand the type of content they are viewing at a glance
the final thumbnail for the overall goty
the entire set of vectors used
Graphics on Graphics on Graphics
Unity within any even like this is always something i strive to achieve. There were a few important elements to include in each variation so that the vectors felt like they all came from the same family. Something else i wanted to ensure was that they worked at smaller sizes for use on thumbnails across various device types and screen sizes
the look of boty on instagram when we announced our winners
Translating to Social
As always with a project of this size I enlisted the help of many teams to help spread the design language anywhere the GameSpot brand appeared. I worked with Social Designer Andrew Crosby to develop the look for social which he then executed on posts like the one you see above. They shared the same DNA as everything on site and kept the unity of BOTY 2022 across social.
motion reference frames + thumbnails
unused exploration for the motion graphics title card
gs boty 2022 top 10 games
I worked directly with our motion designer to develop reference frames that he could take an create motion from. I would basically communicate to him that these frames were the "resolve" or end state i was looking to achieve and gave him creative license to do whatever he wanted within the style we had discussed