IGN Entertainment • IGN • 2021
IGN Summer of Gaming 2021
Overview
Role(s): Lead Designer, Art Director
The world was still in the middle of the pandemic, and IGN was bringing back its version of E3 for the second year of Summer of Gaming. This time we wanted a longer run, about three months, and a fresh take on the brand and visuals.
My Responsibilities:
• SoG 2021 logo
• Thumbnail strategy and design
• Motion graphics art direction
• Stream graphics strategy and design
• Promotional strategy and design
• Social strategy and design
• Sales integration
Approach
The idea this year was to go all in on summer aestehtic and color tone. We didn’t want IGN to feel like a surf company, though, so my team and I built something warm and inviting that still showed off the medium and spoke to our previous design language from 2020. It’s technical, spacey illustrations mixed with summery vibes and organic shapes led to a warm, pleasing treatment that was a visual backbone for any coverage that year.
Picking a logo
Many options were considered for the final logo but it came down to small variations. The gradient sun graphic was the key element across each one of them which was the key element from the first year’s logo as well. The idea with this year was mostly to evolve the look and feel to be more polished and have more variations for use in other mediums.
Options for the final logo
The final logo and its variations
Staff apparel
For the first time during E3 we gave our staff the option to choose the staff design they preferred most. I tasked the 2 designers I worked with on the event with creating 2 distinct staff shirts. Angela leaned into the techy, space influenced design style and illustrations while Julia went with a retro sci-fi camp shirt vibe.
Staff shirt option 1
Credit: Angela Nguyen
Staff shirt option 2
Credit: Julia Rago
Social presence
Just like with year 1 of SOG, having a consistent design style that translates to every medium and media type was important to me. I created the majority of the social promo assets and worked directly with our social designer Julia Rago to come up with a template that fit the established style.
Social post style for SOG 2021
YouTube banner for SOG 2021
IGN Expo
The IGN Expos were our way of showcasing the biggest games and features of the event. This gave me another opportunity to expand the scope of the design language and update the looks we had used in year 1 of SOG. You can watch one of the full VODs above to get an idea of what the EXPO itself felt and looked like.
Full Expo from SOG 2021
Stream graphics
I’m proud of the first year’s stream overlays we made for SOG but I felt like for year 2 they could be pushed even further. Specifically I wanted to create some visual variations since users would be seeing these overlays for hours and hours at a time. I had 3 color variants used for the main show and in addition to that made custom overlays for our SOG branded versions of the normal IGN podcasts as well like Unlocked, NGCW and Beyond.
In the end I feel like it gave each day a unique look, reduced visual fatigue and made it look like we had a lot of custom work when in reality it was the smart use of templates to create so many variants.
A 2-up green variation of our stream graphics
A 3-up orange variation of our stream graphics
A 4-up blue variant of our stream graphics
The homepage experience
One thing about any event that IGN put on was that we had a secret weapon for promotion. Years prior to SOG we had developed a way to easily theme the IGN homepage in a way that would let us make our events and big editorial features feel like a complete content takeover for that day or week.
SOG gave us the opportunity to blow that out and for the first time we added a custom status/ticker bar that would drive people to more of our cover as well as provide countdowns and alerts for upcoming shows.
The IGN homepage
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