IGN Entertainment • IGN • 2020
IGN Summer of Gaming 2020 Branding
Overview
Role(s): Lead Designer, Art Director, Creative Strategy
Early in the pandemic, a lot of people were going through some of the hardest moments of their lives. In-person events were gone for the foreseeable future, so much was in disarray, but IGN still wanted to build excitement around the E3 window, when gamers always look for the biggest news of the year. The challenge: with E3 out of the picture, how does a media brand like IGN put on its own summer gaming event to fill the void? Especially since we had never done anything like it.
My Responsibilities:
• SoG 2020 logo
• Thumbnail strategy and design
• Stream graphics strategy and design
• Motion graphics art direction
• Promotional strategy and design
• Social strategy and design
• Sales integration
• Illustration art direction
Approach
Building a brand new tentpole event on the level of E3 wasn’t easy, especially with Geoff Keighley and his team running Summer Game Fest, which was getting bigger every year and posed real competition to our effort. For Summer of Gaming I wanted a backdrop viewers could sink into without worrying about the world falling apart around them. We weren’t connected as a society, so the plan was to “traverse” the globe to show off our announcements/partners, and hopefully leave viewers and participants feeling a little more connected along the way.
Key decision
Traveling the globe as the concept. The intro graphics flew around the globe to each “location”, the different studios, each illustrated to match its vibe.
Results
Filled the E3 gap
Created from scratch when COVID shut down E3, IGN’s biggest time of year for coverage and sponsorships, and came close to E3-level viewing, spread over three months.
Made it a yearly event
2020 was a big enough success that IGN brought Summer of Gaming back in 2021 instead of pivoting to something else.
Two one-off Xbox consoles
Designed a custom console and controller skin in the Summer of Gaming look for an Xbox partnership, given away to two winners.
Mood boards
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.
Initial SOG 2020 mood board pitch
IGN 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 used Google Optimize to add these elements into the IGN homepage in a temporary way that could be switched on/off easily from our account.
Key decision
A homepage theme you could switch off. It ran for the full three months, with regular updates and tweaks along the way.
The SOG 2020 homepage theme
Social channels
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.
YouTube banner assets for SOG 2020
SOG 2020 social template by Julia Rago
Postcards from around the world
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 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
Sketch roughs for the postcards we had planned
Credit: Julia Rago
The final versions of our postcards
Credit: Julia Rago
Motion graphics approach
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.
Storyboard for the postcard intros
Credit: Julia Rago
Postcard for Amazon Game Studios
Credit: Angela Nguyen
Social presence
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
IGN Expo debut archive
Twitter emojis made for IGN
On air representation
With COVID 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
Promo art for the debut of SOG
The look of the stream overlays
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
Key decision
A modular schedule. At one point it became a full social rundown of the schedule, posted to tease and hype the content.
The full schedule for SOG
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.
My artboard from the project
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