IGN Ent. • 2019-Present
IGN Social Platforms Redesign + Strategy
Role(s): Lead Designer, Creative Strategy, Art Director
Just like with IGN's Youtube presence there was another glaring need that the company faced and it was a more unified approach for its social designs. For years IGN had utilized its social channels for mostly the posting of meme content, reviews and gameplay videos which was very successful but never really gave the brand the prominence in the space it should have garnered. The desire was to completely refresh the entire social look and feel and relaunch it with a set of templates anyone on the team could use
My Responsibilities:
• Social redesign strategy/execution
• Promotional design strategy/execution
• Staff training
• Style definitions and guidelines
We again did lots of research and competitive analysis of what other successful orgs were doing and in the end we came back with some core elements that made this new style really shine
We decided to implement a consistent typographic style that gave the viewer a headline and a small amount of supplemental info for each story. The idea was to put this concise info onto the graphic itself so that as users scrolled they could quickly get a scan of what was happening. With this came a shift in the quality and composition of our designs to something that looked and felt more prestigious and represented IGN as the industry leader in the space it was.
Just like with the YT redesign this came with the need to train non-designers on templates i had developed that were user friendly and allowed them to make designs that looked and felt custom
igns social design progression over the years
With the new designs set forth in 2019, there was a lot of analysis done by myself and the social team of what we could improve upon in a redesign.
With the old style these were the key pieces holding it back:
• Lack of focus
• No typographic hierarchy
• Uses IGN brand and logo incorrectly
• No flexibility from a template perspective
• Uses logos in the imagery which is against our guidelines
And with the new design we established these across the board
• Strong object focus
• Typographic hierarchy
• Colorful
• Uses IGN brand consistently
• Has flexibility for many types and lengths of content
the 2019 redesign
Where everything started was at this point in 2019 when I worked directly with the leadership of the social design team as well as the team of editors they had to produce content. I met with them early on to gather what types of content they wanted to showcase and these initial templates you see are what came of it.
Just like with my redesign of IGN's yYoutube thumbnails, i implemented the same approval and training process for the non-designers we had utilizing these templates on a day to day basis. I would make myself available to the team throughout the day for assistance as well on standby.
the 2020 refresh
The 2019 redesign was a great success in bringing together IGN's social presence for the first time and really elevating us to be the leader in the social games space. IGN established those initial templates and they proved to be very versatile but after about a year+ of time we felt like we could push things even further.
These examples you see were the refresh i came up with for the team. A few key things changed. I swapped our font to be condensed allowing for us to fit more text into a headline while still maintaining style. I also added more ability for the team to credit artists and sources within along with an update to the IGN watermark that was solely for the social channels and spoke to its more forward and open approach to design
Game Mess Mornings
When the 2019 style was first established I knew that if this new approach would be successful, it needed to be versatile and able to accommodate content types of all kind. As seen in these examples for Microsoft's Xbox event "XO", i adapted our base template to make the social posts for that event feel special but still familiar to the IGN look and feel
This was done with our end of year events and E3 as well over the years. The templates i developed in conjunction with the social team over the years allowed us to achieve a wide range of content and always keep our feeds looking fresh.
IGN's current look and feel
credit: julia rago
Any good design should be able to evolve and adapt over time to trends and also be resistant of them. The styles i had established early on continued to be utilized to this day and now pushed even further. As seen in some of these examples, the templates have adapted an even more exploratory approach to using typography as a key piece of the composition.
Julia Rago (IGN's Lead Visual Designer) helped to push this style forward and continues to maintain its look and feel as time has gone on