Brief
BPL Productions is a company that specializes in game coverage and tournament operations, both professional and community-oriented. They host and manage events in a variety of video games, including Overwatch, Valorant, and Marvel Rivals, working for companies such as Blizzard Entertainment.
Starting in June, I lead the design team for the work on the upcoming season of the community-oriented league, Season 5, which focuses on the game Overwatch. This season, which consisted of three different skill divisions, and over 30 teams, needed graphics made for schedules, weekly graphics, and more.
The chosen theme for this season was an 80's retro style. Rather than using a faux aesthetic commonly seen in attempts to recreate imagery from the era, I decided to look to graphics directly from the 80s as a point of reference for how to style this season's branding.
I began with creating the key graphics that would be needed throughout the season - schedules and weekly recaps. Versions of these were created for each league, which each having a different color palette to make it easily identifiable while still feeling cohesive to the overall theme of the season.
The other key graphics that needed to be created throughout the season were those for weekly highlight matches. Each week, one match from each league was highlighted and a graphic was created for it. These graphics were often directly in reference to an advertisement, poster, or other graphic from the 80s. These graphics were often made with in-game assets such as characters, maps, and digital assets found throughout the game. I was careful to ensure that when choosing these things, they all aligned with both the theme as well as the intent behind the graphic.
As the season's playoffs came to a close, champions were crowned. A graphic was made for each of these teams, and it was chosen that, rather than keeping the color palettes found throughout the season, creating a graphic that fit the team thematically while still referencing the 80s was the best way to create a graphic that really stood out and highlighted the seasonal champions.
