Riot Games Fan Art Platform
Riot Games is known as one of the most popular game developers in the world. Their game League of Legends has amassed fans worldwide, and with those fans, comes large amounts of fan art of the various characters within the League of Legends Universe. Riot was lacking an experience within their site that helped give customers an opportunity to easily share their fan art, as well as an easy way for the same people to view everyone else’s work. As a senior designer, I was able to collaborate with my creative director on the look and feel, along with my fellow design and development team to concept a site that did just that.
Context
Riot Games is the most player-focused game developer and publisher in the world. Famous for their game, League of Legends, they have amassed millions of active fans.
Problem
Active fans created large amounts of fan art, but there was no centralized place to be able to feature it on the LoL site. We were tasked to build a platform that showcased the community creations from around the world.
Role
As a senior designer, I worked with my creative director, experience designer and two of our developers to help create an experience that was not only easy to use, but matched the unique look and feel of the League of Legends world.
Discovery
After meeting with the client, it was clear that this site was to be built for the fans, and only for the fans. We were tasked with finding a structure that would allow for not only artwork to be beautifully displayed, but also to generate excitement for the users.
Wireframes
When working with the UX designer, we explored a few different options for how to organize the content, ultimately deciding on a content waterfall. Continuing to focus on the primary goal of highlighting fan art, we wanted to allow for as much to be surfaced right away, while still having designated space for other content.
Visual Language
Wanting iconography and navigating to be clear and elegant, we created a well thought out visual language to distinguish between the fan art site and the League of Legends web experience.
Visual Design
This styling was established by my Creative Director, and I helped assist him in building out the pages for desktop and mobile. When designing the pages, we wanted the styling to feel like you left your game, and were able to look at almost a trading card wall, highlighting all of your friends favorite heroes and villains. League of Legends has an already established look and feel on their site, and we wanted to make this site feel like it was designed by their own team, blending seamlessly. We wanted the style to be a perfect balance between jaw dropping imagery and clean typography, the design of the site allowed for users to view artwork from all over the world, submit their own, and vote in contests to promote the top artwork.
The Results
Rocked the Vote
After launch, Riot saw immediate success among their customers. Fans started submitting artwork, and filled the grid sooner than they had anticipated. We launched with a voting contest to pick top artwork for one of the factions, and within the time period of a few weeks, over 2,000 LoL users submitted their votes.
Champions
Based on the success of the fan voting site, Riot returned to us to do a number of other projects, including a site highlighting over 150 champions and their backstories within the league of legends site.