IGN Ent. • 2020
IGN Summer of Gaming 2020
Role(s): Lead Designer, Art Director, Creative Strategy
The pandemic was a time where many people were going through some of the worst times of their life, especially early on. With in person events seemingly gone for the foreseeable future we at IGN wanted to still create excitement around the E3 time frame most gamers always looked to for some of the most exciting gaming news and coverage of the year. The challenge was that with E3 out of the picture, how could an editorial entity like IGN do to put on its own summer gaming event to fill the void?
My Responsibilities:
• SoG 2020 logo
• Thumbnail design strategy/execution
• Stream graphics strategy/execution
• Motion graphics art direction
• Promotional design strategy/execution
• Social design strategy/execution
• Sales integration strategy/execution
• Illustration art direction
Obviously establishing a brand new tentpole editorial event on the level of an E3 was no easy task. Especially with the likes of Geoff Keighly and his team producing the industry leading Summer Games Fest that was gaining more prominence year after year
For SoG i really wanted to provide a visual backdrop that viewers could sink into and not feel or worry about the way the world might be falling apart amidst the pandemic. In a world where we were not very connected as a society, we came up with the plan to "traverse" the globe to show off our announcements and hopefully make our viewers and participants more connected in the process
initial sog 2020 mood board pitch
The initial mood board for SoG 2020 leaned heavily into the travel aspect of things that was at the core of our concept and desire for the visuals. The motif we used of the topographic lines in particular would become a mainstay of our style from 2020 to 2021
the sog 2020 homepage theme
This was our first real test of a larger scale homepage theme for IGN. We had done some minimal changes in the past but this was a more full scale approach with additional components added in (such as the schedule unit you see)
We utilized Google Optimize to add these elements into the IGN homepage in a temporary way that could be switched on/off easily from our account
youtube banner assets for sog 2020
sog 2020 social template by julia rago
Pushing the brand to all our platforms meant the social channels needed a look that maintained the unified look i had established in our core group of elements. Through our social art/avatars and our social posts as well, we added in core SoG elements that were the visual glue between each connecting piece that lived away from the ign.com experience
sketch roughs for the postcards we had planned
credit: julia rago
the final versions of our postcards
credit: julia rago
A big part of the initial pitch for SoG 2020 was the use of these custom illustrated postcards that each of our partners would receive. So for example with an Amazon Studios we set the mythical theme of that studio in the midst of the Amazon River where beasts larger than boats roam the rivers. Or with Bloober team we leaned into a more dark, horror theme for our setting to give it a mood and setting appropriate for the content
storyboard for the postcard intros
credit: julia rago
postcard for amazon game studios
credit: angela nguyen
These postcards all came together in a motion graphics piece that showed the full start to finish product of our SoG campaign. We had hoped to produce more of these custom pieces but just didn't have time to make more with the priorities we had.
IGN EXPO debut archive
twitter emojis made for ign
With the debut of SoG and IGN's working relationship with Twitter from years past, we were able to get a custom emoji made for people using our #summerofgaming hashtag. This was a fun new challenge for me to figure out what worked best at such small legibility and what would give SoG the most brand impact
promo art for the debut of sog
the look of the stream overlays
With COVD came the need for not just IGN but for the majority of media brands to adapt their production to accompany a fully remote show. With that came the need to develop custom overlays for showing off our hosts but also as a way to display valuable event info and branding
With the debut of SoG came the opportunity for sales as well so positioning needed to be decided for branded areas across all screens. This is probably one of about fifteen different stream layouts i came up with for use on SoG
the full schedule for sog
Scheduling Things Out
Infographics and large scale information design has always been a passion of mine and a unique challenge to solve. From hierarchy to typography to contrast to color callouts, there are just so many factors to account for and decide what feels best.
The schedule for SoG presented quite the challenge just due to the sheer wealth of content we were putting out and wanted to hype up to our viewers. This schedule also needed to work for social so when designing it i made sure to make the units as modular as possible so they could fit nicely in a square social format
my artboard from the project
The Process
Once again i chose to amass most of my explorations and execution within Illustrator. It was quite the collection of assets by the end of the project and it spawned so many variations of graphics used throughout SoG that year.