CDs Alexandre Torres, Nidia Dias, Tom Crate, and director Adam Brandon lead the Tendril crew in crafting a powerful identity, motion branding system, and toolkit for Riot Worlds 2022, the annual global championships for League of Legends.

From the team at Tendril: “The challenge was to create a design system that could scale with each stage of the competition and allowed us to have many combinations of team colours, logos, and assets while remaining consistent, beautiful, visually distinct, and recognizable as Worlds 2022.

“The hero logo is our primary brand signifier. Comprising a holding shape, typography, and the ‘Worlds’ existing shield, we crafted a wordmark that echoes the same sensibilities and keeps the world’s logo front and center across all design work.

“The logo also forms the basis of the grid system, meaning that all elements within the system scale up or down while maintaining a consistent relationship with one another.
 

The large-scale, fast-paced, and constantly changing nature of Worlds meant we needed to develop a system that could pivot alongside the wide variety of broadcast, events, and digital teams — remaining modular, flexible and easy to follow and use.

 
“The power of LoL comes from how teams can reconfigure their champions in an almost unlimited number of ways. A mixture of strengths and weaknesses shapes each game’s overall play style and outcome. Using this idea as the basis for our motion, we developed a distinct ‘reconfiguration’ behavior that unites all our 2D elements across the system.

“Our visual identity uses two different fonts: Manuka Bold, our primary font, maintains the distinctive bold compressed style synonymous with LoL Esports, but with enough nuance and character to feel unique to Worlds ’22. Fraktion, our secondary font, maintains an athletic, technical edge, with enough visual density to stand alone when we aren’t using our primary font. ​​​​​​​

“We developed a bold and energetic color palette that can be combined in different ways to create a coherent color story across the entire competition. Throughout the tournament, the color combinations and densities transform, helping to differentiate each stage at a glance.

“The large-scale, fast-paced, and constantly changing nature of Worlds meant we needed to develop a system that could pivot alongside the wide variety of broadcast, events, and digital teams — remaining modular, flexible and easy to follow and use.

“All key visuals had to showcase the team colors and logos playing in each stage of the competition, with each team only being revealed four weeks before every event. We developed a bespoke After Effects toolkit that allows RIOT’s internal teams to change the team colors and logos across the key visuals without having to dive into 3D.”
 

 
Client: Riot Games
Creative Director at Riot: Carrie Dunn
Creative Services Manager: Cassie Jo Dull
Creative Director: David Jung, Vince Than

Production: Tendril
Creative Director: Alexandre Torres, Nidia Dias, Tom Crate
Executive Producer: Ramona Gornik-Lee
Producer: Niko Hook, Emily McCallen
Coordinator: Andrea Chan
Director: Adam Brandon
Art Director: Bruno Canales
CG Sup: Alexandre Veaux
Designer: Rafa Cezar, Leonardo Bortolussi, Pedro Cruz,Yeseong Kim, Runbo Chen
FX: Bruno Canales, Benjamin Luthold, William Sharkey, Aiden Riekenbrauck, Yeseong Kim
3D Animator: Benjamin Luthold, William Sharkey
2D Animator: Hernan Lindenbaum
Lighting/Rendering: Alexandre Veaux
Compositing, Grading, Finishing: Corey Larson
Toolkitting: Zack Lovatt
Pitch 2D/Designer: Andrew Footit