We were excited to be asked by Riot Games to design the branding and brand system for their latest music group, HEARTSTEEL, which is comprised of six in-game champions from League of Legends.
Like the band themselves, the brand brings together the member’s unique qualities, with each of the boys being assigned a colour and their own symbol—based on a small ‘copyright’ symbol—that harnesses their key attributes and represents their individual personalities.
Despite the brand’s palette being heavily black and white, it also features a heavy punch of neon through the boys’ individually assigned colours. We expand further on this with hints of colour revealed by the refraction, reflection and chromatic aberration that we developed as Photoshop image treatments and pre-rendered 3D assets.
The brand typography system uses a dynamic pairing of the sturdy and sharp Pressio (Signal), in combination the lo-fi techy Therma (Astrae Studio) for headlines and titles.
Because of the themes in their first single, Paranoia, some of the assets are based around themes of surveillance, but with more of a fun cyberpunk/sci-fi take. Other assets took on more of the language around parental guidance labelling, copyright symbology and replicable smallprint-esque lockups, which were used to house catchphrases and other HEARTSTEEL “sub-logos”. We designed tens of these and nearly all of them made the cut.
Credits
Campaign Content Creation
Riot Games
Creative Direction
Aries Moross
Design
Johnny Brennan, Jasmin Chavez, Oscar Cheung, Cash Frances, Nick Greenbank, Aries Moross, Wale Osunla, Cliff Tanner Setiawan, Giacomo Sforza, Julian Stephan, Marc Urtasun, Ben Wood
Motion Design
Pierce Cunnane
Leio Kirtley
Julian Stephan
Project Management
Bex Dowse
Ellen Morrison
