Design’s big picture in esports
How important design is to esports?
As previously been stated in the last post, design is an entirely separate niche. It’s a contagious part of the body of esports and deserves an objective analysis. It has a history intertwined with the design tradition in sports as we know it. If you say, it organically migrated from sports to esports, you won’t be far from the truth.
Let’s purposefully overlook the redundancy of the question and still ask it: How important design is to esports? You’d suppose the answer would be: very important. It’s not where I’m getting at though. The question sounds simple but invites a nuanced answer.
Of course, there are miles of text that could be written emphasizing the impact of look development on tournaments’ banners and merch. But the real dilemma and, at the same time, the difference from traditional sports design is how design impacts the target audience.
Regardless of whether you are a sports fan or a person who couldn’t care less about sports, if you see a football club emblem, you almost immediately recognize the big picture the design was created for. That is sports. The same cannot always be said of esports. Reality often puts industry artists in a precarious position when it comes to designing anything. On one hand, an artist is ought to create something gamers and lovers of videogames are going to recognize and associate with their favourite gaming experiences. On the other hand, the record shows that the uninitiated public that encounters the Internet content devoted to esports events usually shrug their shoulders at the sight of weird icons and esports identics. Everything is flashy and cool, but… foreign. It doesn’t cause estrangement of the viewers of course, but it definitely causes them to move on to whatever they’d been intending to do before they stumbled upon that ad that was uncalled for.
So it’s about seeing this big picture.
And this beat is not exclusive to esports alone. Talk to the designers in various fields and notice how this is often a common thread for all of them. The big picture always requires teamwork. And by team here I don’t mean a team of designers, because designers often aren’t the only ones who create a vision. Marketers, developers, researchers, and people of other fields all participate in the process. And this is where teams often fail. A simple mistake of creating gunk of classical sports designs and contemporary trends, and then viewing it as a win button is what new businesses often go to. To understand plainly, it is actually about traditional design patterns and new trends, but the focus on both target groups is essential in this.
From a big picture standpoint, having people outside esports as a marketing priority is the way to go. We always find a way to adapt designs to the ones in DOTA 2 and Counter Strikes. Iconic characters and guns are iconic because they’re known to the public that sit in droves in front of TV screens watching how their favourite teams compete in international tournaments. Exclude non-esports-folk out of your marketing strategy and all of a sudden it’s not efficient anymore. But when, for instance, your local esports team’s outfit matches well with an outfit of your local sports team, people who are not familiar with esports are going to take notice with partiality you’d ideally expect. If your esports team’s name sounds like an NBA team’s, it works well too. Right association is what your business has no right to fail at.
What else causes designs to fail? There are several reasons. One of the more important ones is that resources for researchers and marketers aren’t provided, and designers are the ones who end up brainstorming the whole branding creation from beginning to end. As a result, the workload put on designers is more than substantial. A dangerous road to take for a company.
However wrong design strategy can be, there’s no reason to assume you can’t get your esports design right. Why? Design field of esports is very unconventional. Many would be surprised to find out that most professional designers and artists, who spent years working in other fields, consistently fail in esports upon being introduced to it. Conventional designs don’t work in esports, and no wonder design here is often the burden of the artists who have never designed a thing outside esports in their entire life. They became professional esports artists within the confines of the industry’s requirements.
27 Nerds have a dedicated team of artists and designers, who first hand came to know of design issues new businesses face today. We realize the importance of setting your business on the right track early on, making sure your brand is seen both by the viewers of esports and those who are reached via the vast arsenal of means the industry has at its disposal. If you realize how fundamental design is for esports, drop us a line and share your story. Don’t assume that just because you are a starter, a lack of expertise will hinder the growth of your business. We have accounted for the questions you can’t answer and the ones you didn’t think to ask.
