Unicamp Tritons → Designing an Esports Brand By Myself
Not just the brand, the whole visual identity. What a challenge, honestly. Check out the process!
→ See the finished project on Behance
With over 34 thousand active students, Unicamp is one of the most prominent universities not only in Brazil but also in all of Latin America, often ranked top 3 in the continent.
It’s also the university I attended! I’m a recently graduated bachelor of Media & Communications. My parents also went to this same university (that’s where they met), so you could say I have a pretty close relation to Unicamp for a long time, at least since I was born.
It was a great honor to be accepted as the lead designer for Unicamp Tritons, their official esports team, back in April 2021. Soon I was designing their social media posts, such as these two, my favorites:
Challenges
Not long after I joined, I noticed they were lacking a consistent design system or brand guidelines. All that existed was a logo and a few fonts scattered through their Google Drive folders.
In order to start composing social media layouts, I faced the challenge of making design choices without relying on any set of already defined rules. I knew that in order to stay consistent, I would have to create these brand guidelines first.
And… the current brand had some issues. Starting with the typography, the chosen typeface was uppercase only and did not support accents (a must have in Brazilian Portuguese, our language uses them a lot).
Don’t get me wrong: the logo was not bad! It had plenty of strong aspects, but some things were just not working for it. I also interviewed some people on their opinions and interpretations of it, as part of research.
Current Logo
Strengths
- Sportive/varsity nature is well communicated
- The overall shape is really interesting and unique
- Perspective and sharp edges look powerful and imposing
Weak Spots
- It doesn’t work in reductions. The logo has too much detail and loses all legibility in small sizes, so it can’t adapt to different media contexts very well.
For example, in a broadcasted tournament there’s not much room for each team’s logos. Nowadays, being able to adapt to a small form is a requirement.
- Design looks a bit dated and unlike the style of professional organizations of today
- The team’s theme doesn't really show up anywhere. I consider this a missed opportunity!
- The color choice doesn’t make much sense, especially considering the theme.
There are shapes that resemble sea waves, but they’re often interpreted as a mustache.
The Trident Issue
Look, we’re tritons. The coolest visual element we have is the trident, our special weapon. The thing is… the trident in the logo is kind of hard to identify.
That is for 2 reasons: first, it’s upside down. That’s a really uncommon way to represent a trident.
Secondly, its stem is composed of the letter T in Tritons. Cool idea! But the thing is: it’s not very clear that the letter T and the three dents are the same object. At first glance, many people thought this was a stool or a tripod.
So, I thought… If I have to create guidelines for this brand and make it work better, I might as well create a new brand. Sure, it’s way more work, but it would be a great and exciting opportunity! The timing was also great: just in time for the team’s 5 year anniversary.
It was just a suggestion that could be discarded right away if my colleague’s deemed inappropriate. Luckily, they all got really hyped for it.
Redesign Goals
- A more versatile and legible logo
- A professional and modern look (steering away from an amateur look)
- Honoring the team’s history
- Making better use of theme
Honoring the team’s history was something I had in mind all the time. We never intended this to seem like we were overwriting everything that came before. I knew it was important that fans would still relate to the team. That’s why throughout the development of the new brand, I tried to reference the classic logo and branding as much as I could.
Moodboard
I researched how tritons and tridents are represented in media, especially video games and pop culture. Triton, in greek mythology, is the son of Poseidon (aka Neptune), but the term triton is frequently used to refer to a merman in english.
Here’s a few of the images that helped inspire the creation process.
Benchmarking
I researched the esports ecosystem and selected a few brands that nailed it, IMO. Each served as inspiration for different aspects.
I also looked a lot at how their visual identities were expressed in social media and merch.
Sketching
The first thing I did was drawing the current logo. Replicating the design with my own hands made me really pay attention to every shape that composed it.
In this page, I also tried to list possible changes I could experiment with: rotating the trident, unifying the stem to the dents, simplifying everything and/or adding more themed elements.
I liked the idea of the letter T being a trident or a part of one. Below, I saw two ways to go forward: A) substituting the middle T for a one-piece trident; or B) using the T as the trident stem, just like the classic logo, but this time pointing upwards;
Thinking about tridents, I wondered what kinds of shapes a trident could have. I asked:
- Is there a correct, more common or historically accurate shape for a trident?
- Should the dents point inward, outward, or be centered?
- Should they have the same length, or should the middle one be longer?
- Should it have curves or sharp straight lines?
After doing some research and drawing the possible variations, I concluded there’s no correct way and all of them were pretty common. It was a matter of choice.
I decided to go with Option B.
In the small floating piece of paper to the right, I was documenting ideas that I could foresee for this logo: a reveal animation in which the dents come out of the letter T aggressively and the logo as part of an emblem.
In the page behind it, you can see I was also pretty excited to see tridents and waves as visual elements applied to social media posts and other visual content.
Using the largest sketch I had done for the logo, I tried to guess its proportions and started building it in Figma using basic geometric shapes.
After dozens of iterations, I got to a shape I thought was strong. Then I decided to round the edges and apply a distortion to it in Adobe Illustrator. The goal was to give it more of an organic curved feel and the rounded edges make it look way smoother. I think the distortion also made it more harmonic and balanced!
The Logo
The Wordmark
Using the typeface Work Sans Bold as a basis, I also created a wordmark for the brand.
I swapped the letter T for the one I had created for the logo (before the distortion). I also replicated the little dents I had introduced to the logo to every other letter (except for the letter O) and tweaked the kerning a little bit to make up for the extra space the dents ended up taking.
The Emblem
I felt the need to create a sports emblem for Tritons, using the logo at the center, like I had sketched before. While the logo would work better at small places, the emblem was intended for large spaces where traditional sports emblems excel, such as flags (pictures below).
I used the wordmark (1) as a starting point, developed it further (2). Later I applied the same distortion of the logo to it and added some themed visual elements (3).
The goal was for the new emblem to follow the same shape and structure of the old emblem, so it could be a bridge connecting both brands.
Visual Identity and Guidelines
After the logo, wordmark and emblem were developed, it was time to define the rest of the visual identity.
Typography
Using royalty-free typefaces was mandatory for this project. After researching, I settled for these two amazing type families: Cooper Hewitt and Work Sans, for titles and paragraph text respectively.
Color Palette
Probably one of the most impactful moves, the Tritons team and I agreed that it would be nice to change the team’s main color. It was natural to choose some shade of blue given the theme.
However, I decided to keep the original red as a support accent color. It keeps the link between the brands alive and I absolutely love the contrast between the cold and hot colors.
The palette also includes black (#000), white (#fff), and coal (#333).
Documented Guidelines
Other aspects of the brand, such as use of image (instructions on image manipulation) and graphic elements (patterns, vectors, icons) were also created. Everything was documented in a Notion page inside the team’s workspace.
The new designers at Tritons, who will take it from me, were then given orientations on how to apply the brand to their creations. I’m excited to see what they will come up with using the brand I created!
Final Considerations
It was a great honor to be given this opportunity at Unicamp Tritons. I want to thank everybody in the 2021 staff for their support and motivation. This was a solo project but not a solitary one!
The feedback has been amazing. The team was very satisfied with the results, which is a great sign.
Goals were accomplished
- The new logo is definitely more versatile. The numerous ways the design team has already been able to utilize it proves that point. Working with the former one was way harder.
- Considering the feedback we received, it does look more professional and modern as well. Other teams in the university esports scenario expressed their admiration!
- Former presidents of Tritons, including the ones that were there during its first steps, shared their feelings about the rebrand. They confessed sometimes it’s hard to let it go and see your child change so much, but they showed relief stating they could see how much respect we had for Tritons’ history in our creation.
- The theme is now louder, more obvious and more consistent. The team’s communication materials already mention water, the ocean and sea creatures way more often, which I consider a direct consequence!
What didn’t work
Being completely honest: the emblem did not turn out too good.
I’m not satisfied with it, but I know I tried my best. It was one of the biggest challenges and making it work seemed impossible, it was just not clicking. I had promised to deliver something and, in the end, having a final result was already a victory.
In my opinion, it’s not stronger than the former emblem, as it should be. Its composition is weird, the Wordmark kerning had to be tweaked again for it to stay symmetric and it ended up looking awkward and inconsistent, to say the least.
Even though the waves and the color blue were cool additions, the emblem is definitely still the weakest part of the brand and now I wonder if it was really necessary. Maybe the delivered result would be better without it, but I stuck to the idea that it was needed because of its relation to the former logo.
Looking back, I think I was too afraid of a negative reception from people who were too attached to the former brand. I tried too hard to pay homage to it as if it would shield us from resistance to change and that ended up making the result a little bit weaker. Maybe I should’ve focused on the parts that were working already!
What went well
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the whole brand (except for the emblem). I’m extremely proud of the logo, color palette and graphic elements.
Motion design was also a big surprise to me: I had no prior experience, but I had many ideas. Being able to turn them into reality in a matter of weeks and seeing they actually worked was incredible. Such a great experience!
