Radiance Esports

A new esports brand with an emphasis on positivity, acceptance, and community enrichment.

Disciplines: Branding, Apparel Design, Digital Design

Completion Date: February 2022

Brand Design

The process of working with Radiance to develop their brand was one of the most unique I’d had in my career up until that point. The client’s original request was simply to help with a brand focused on positivity, community, and inclusivity. While I had a hunch based on the client’s background that this was for an esports team, they (understandably) didn’t immediately want to spill all the beans to a designer they had just met. While this resulted in a few early concepts that didn’t hit the mark right away,we eventually built trust together to build exactly what we needed the brand to be. What’s more, this hesitance in communication ultimately ended up aiding in creating something more free from norms established by other brands in esports.

I wanted to focus on how positivity and kindness reciprocate throughout a community; making others feel welcome makes them want to make others feel welcome. I used this concept in the brand’s logo to build the shape of an R that looped in on itself, similar to how we wanted positive individuals within the community to loop others in. The visual motif of rays of light making up the left side of the R echoed the sentiments of positivity that we wanted to cultivate in the community while referring to the brand's namesake.

With this foundation in place, I wanted to establish visual elements around the logo that were confident but didn’t take themselves too seriously. The brand's color palette and typography work together to create a reputable image, without being afraid to have some fun. Overall, Radiance’s branding was a great learning experience for me personally. This brand is an excellent case study in how to build something from scratch around a firm brand message of positivity, community, and inclusivity. I also learned a lot about client communication from the outset of a working relationship, specifically how to better build trust and communicate a vested interest in the project’s success.

Selected pages from Radiance's brand style guide.

Team jersey designs.

Selected slides from a pitch deck for potential partners and sponsors.

Animated Logo stinger for use in videos.

Social Media and Web Design

Given Radiance’s emphasis on building up their community, social media was a high priority for us. I wanted to leverage the strengths and weaknesses of creating consistency and variety in our social media graphics. Stable, repeated elements in social posts reinforce the brand’s image and make information easy to find, while variety can draw attention to individual posts in exchange for potential viewer confusion.

With this in mind, we decided that it made the most sense to create bespoke graphics for posts about community events, sponsorship announcements, and the like, while reserving more consistent, templated posts for updates about teams’ events and games. This also allowed us to create very well-rounded Photoshop templates for our social media manager to use during events.

In hindsight, these templates would have been much better suited for our social media manager made in Canva. They likely would have less time to make, despite our social media manager having some design background. However, I’m still proud of the robust, easy-to-use templates we were able to create in Photoshop.

I’m also very happy with the illustrations related to each major game we participated in. Too often, organizations will reuse art and assets from the games themselves. I think these illustrations were a great way to avoid potential copyright grey areas, as well as create something that would stand out from other brands’ graphics.

Branded social banners and early post graphics.

Pre- and post-event announcement graphics, each templated in an editable Photoshop file.

Specialized social graphics for sponsorship announcements and team farewells.

Streamed Events

Although I frequently watch live streams, I’d somehow never had the chance to work on them from a professional side of things until Radiance. Our first priority for our streams was to get general assets that could be used across all team members’ streams, such as starting/offline screens and graphics for the streams’ info sections. For these, I wanted to stay very on-brand, but give everything the feeling that you’re getting an after-hours sneak peek into the teams’ members.

For the event streams, I really wanted to approach the games being played and/or the theming of the event in as unique of a way as I could. The audience for these events could easily include people unfamiliar with Radiance, so it was important that each one felt cared-about, tailored to the game being played or the overall theme of the event.

Overall, creating all of these assets was a great way for me to learn about exactly what goes into a stream’s production. I’d always had an interest in creating overlays, stream assets, and the like, and branding a stream through these assets was a great way for me to step outside of what I had originally been familiar with.

General Stream graphics and offline screen.

Materials for a Hearthstone tournament hosted by Radiance.

Materials for a recurring event where Radiance team members would face off in various games.

Apparel Design

If live-stream assets had me step outside of my comfort zone, being approached to design apparel was the equivalent of skydiving out of it. I would never have imagined that I would be doing anything like this at the start of my career, but I was ecstatic to give it a shot.

The first collection had some initial hiccups, specifically in the way of what we wanted to do with the product line. I had initially pitched items that would be very on-brand, sticking closely to Radiance’s brand colors to establish the brand itself in this introductory line. However, the client really wanted to push outside of the brand immediately into different colors, styles, etc. While I still don’t necessarily agree with this, I’m happy with this initial launch, and I think that the feedback helped push me to create pieces that I may not have thought of initially.

Subsequent collections made it easier to push outside of brand guidelines in a way that made sense. For example, our Classic Collection focused on expanding our jerseys into a hoodie format and using vintage motifs in modern ways. Our Neon Collection placed a focus on bright, fluorescent lights and glowing nightlife. In these collections, I was given more and more trust as far as what the overall pieces would look like, to collaborating on collection theme direction and product names by the Neon Collection.

I think these apparel collections really pushed me outside of what I would have initially thought I could excel at. These were eye-opening processes to show myself exactly what my skills as a designer could be used for with unique projects that I hadn’t necessarily tackled before.

Radiance Solar and Lunar Collection.

Radiance Classics Collection.

Radiance Neon Collection.