Are the best designers in eSports? A peek into a billion dollar industry
Design is a very important aspect of any industry, more-so that even when design is not considered in the creation or development of a product or industry, it has been indirectly considered. This article would take a dive into the beauty and culture of the growing world of eSports design.
I have always wanted to write an article on “The MUNDANE world of eSports design,” but had to put a stop to it because “mundane” was not the right word for such an industry, even though they were plagued with real issues that needed addressing.
The story of eSports design is bigger than one observer could possibly pack into one short article. It is wide, expansive and never starved of detail. This article would do its best to trap some of the essence of eSports design. It being nostalgic, familiar and stained with the weakness of the entire design industry. Within this mess (and hardship), it has managed to thrive by hustle and blood. This pose reminds me of how informal design evolved in a separate location from where eSports is currently maturing.
Stream graphics and Twitch emotes
If words like Stream graphics and Twitch emotes feel strange to you, then it should be interesting to know that words like these are common place to younger audiences of eSports — all of which according to GlobalWebIndex made up about 3 in 10 internet users in Q3 of 2019, largely 16-24-year olds.
Esports designers create items that border around the Visual identity and branding of their host teams or clients, most of these creatives are commonplace. A few examples are:
- Branding; for Teams, including Print/web items, Jerseys, Event materials etc.
- Stream graphics; includes motion and stills to adorn online stream channels and presentations.
- Visual design; including Illustrations and Posters.
- Ad creatives; for marketing.
- Twitch emotes; an emote for a streaming platform (like Twitch) helps to communicate ideas faster — think Emojis and Stickers, but for streaming.
- Sub Badges; subscriber badges are made available to their communities by streamers once they have reached affiliate status, much like virtual medals for loyal fans.
- UI/UX; for Products and Landing pages for Teams, etc.
These are just a few of them, the possibilities are enormous.
A bit of eSports
To understand every bit of eSports (pun intended), you first have to understand the direction of communication and interaction, which is less physical everyday. Somehow, humanity had always known that in the future, she would evolve from physical interactions to a form of virtual day-to-day, she just didn’t believe it in its entirety. We always knew we would become virtual. Take a look at our books, dreams and movies in the past: Back To The Future, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Matrix, Tron and many other releases by outer-worldly thinkers like Isaac Asimov.
Kick back to few generations. If our ancestors were told by a big dreamer that their offspring would speak to each other miles and miles around the world through the web, they would have laughed that person off and called him out as a mad man. Alas! we are living in madness today and storing data — our data — in non-rainy clouds of dreams and fantasies. ESports has come as a child of that dream, part of the madness that we would soon be head deep in. It is an exciting dream.
ESports is a rather new industry,
It is a form of organised multiplayer sport competition using video games.
To make it easier to understand, eSports is similar to competition in Arenas; The Olympics (but for games), the FIFA World Cup, Gladiators, etc. What differs for eSports is that it transfers the thrill, experience and interest of these physical competitions to non athletic ‘players’ in the virtual world. These players compete with each other in their gaming seats from worlds apart, drinking hydrants like G-Fuel and battling each other with game pads and high-tech controllers.
The audience? they stream these exciting competitions from the comfort of their rooms (or wherever they please), though channels like Twitch and Youtube with high data transfer rates in real-time. Nothing is missed.
In 1972 the earliest known eSports competition was recorded to have taken place. Global eSports revenue was estimated to surpass $1 billion — it has, in 2020.
The implications of having something like this — as we have seen from Gladiators in Arenas and Athletes in Olympics — is that many other service industries arise from the growth and are strengthened by it, ENTER eSports Design.
Designers as make-up artists
To account for the aesthetic pleasure that was needed to present a competition to an increasing number of viewers (495 million total viewers as of 2020), the eSports design industry was born.
This was an unusual birth, created out of necessity, and as usual had two pathways to follow: the gutters or the skies. Where it is at this point cannot expressly be known, but the pulse could be felt.
Successful teams like Soar gaming, FaZe Clan, Team Liquid, 100 Thieves, Misfits, etc., are run like tight cults and excel battling in games like PuBG, Counter Strike, League of Legends, Fortnite, Call of Duty. They produce sub-teams to represent them in various competitions where they win laurels, a team could have up to 60+ players with a handful competing in different categories and competitions. ESports players can own their channel while they produce live content for their teams and represent them, gaming in massive competitions as athletes do today. Players, Teams, Organisations, Agencies, Nourishment production outfits and Game creation companies have to be represented by befitting branding and graphics for their stream channels, profiles, websites, etc., again, prompting the need for the eSports designer.
How eSports design stays sharp
The eSports industry generally does not retain branding for too long. They understand the length of their audience’s attention span and are always seeking a refresh of their identities. This refresh comes readily with their constant social media recruiting and informal design competitions.
A careful study of some of these elite (and small) teams would lead you to their Lead designers silently recruiting top talent from the ever re-producing bunch of eSport design professional hopefuls. Most of them have no formal design education and get really great at what they do by observation and practice. This is a very important development, because most of these untrained hands turn out to be very skilled (to awe inspiring) levels over a short while. It is a Zero sum game, they eventually get picked or they don’t.
Most of them have no formal design education and get really great at what they do by observation and practice.
In a case of the very best of timed selection, the selected designer works hard consistently for years and eventually becomes the Lead designer of the team. In other cases, they branch out to bigger agencies in other industries or a Game creation company. Only the best survive.
Where these designers are most solid
The eSports designer’s greatest weapon is Visual design joined with a childlike mind. These designers are obsessed with their taste, detail, effects and grain. They push the bounds of their software and make competing with them slightly harder to reach for the everyday designer. The best of these designers are so skilled in design, illustration and 3D, that they unavoidably get shipped to different industries over time and happen to do well too.
A few industries they often find themselves are:
- Music (album arts and merchandise)
- Motion picture
- Fashion
- Specific art and commissions
- Interface design
And many more.
A peak at how things move
In addition to in-depth knowledge of how 3D software works, these designers manage to be very good at translating their static design skills into motion. “Cool” would be a fitting qualifier for their motion design skills. The level of detail is clear and obvious.
It is not easy to determine exactly how these skills are perfected, but most of what we see had been learned from hours of streamed tutorial content by the more proficient designers over platforms like Twitch.
ESports designers critique themselves, train themselves and mature all within their bubble that is too shiny to be called a bubble.
The videos embedded into this article are just snippets from the forest of motion which eSports designers cultivate.
The culture of giving and brotherhood
The only way to characterise this speed of growth would be to look at the way these designers relate with each other. There are 3 main elements in this observed — and unwritten — structure:
- The Leaders
- The Intermediates
- and the Newbies
1. The leaders
Leaders, who already design for some of the larger teams or gaming companies, constantly dish out design content to the awe of their audience (largely characterised by Newbies and Intermediates), coupled with extensive online stream tutorials ever so often to keep them engaged. They also produce GFX (Graphic effects) packs to be downloaded for free or for a small fee. This erosion of content is easily digested by the other two categories.
2. The Intermediates
They watch, learn and practice (mainly from observation), and in a short while get drafted ceremoniously to one of these teams as Junior designers. They take up the names of their teams alongside their nicknames, Example: Obey FireboyDML, SoarWizkid, etc., where Obey and Soar are popular eSports brands.
With so much effort put in, these designers improve extremely fast and assume the position of Leaders.
3. The Newbies
These are the new kids. They may only have one dream, which is to be a part of one of these teams, so they grind 10 times more. They create designs for their peers (and new stream channels) for very small pay, while they build their experience levels in the process.
Ever so often, they create Social media banner designs and logo redesigns for their dearest Intermediates and Leaders. These gift works improve their recognition in the space and helps the Leaders quickly judge their proficiency level. In no time (or never), they take a step up the ladder.
This culture might seem very archaic, but it has managed to create a huge flood of designers at the peak of pop and cyberpunk culture, deeply confident in modern design movements like Acid design, New-age Brutalism, Chrome type, etc. It is such a beauty to watch.
See randomly selected social media headers in the section below.
Random headers in eSports design
A small collection of no-context author curated headers.
Competition helps to grow these designers
A key factor that has also helped to grow these designers are paid competitions. This has helped to strengthen their grasp on maintaining consistency in visual branding. These competitions are mostly initiated by Leaders or Intermediates, but mainly the former.
An example is the most recent Jesperish2020 Community Design Contest, where the peak prize money stood at just $200. See hashtag here for a follow up. This contest and its predecessor (#Jesperish20Kcontest) drew hundreds of designers together in creative works and expression.
Important to note is that designers like Jesperish grew very popular from competitions such as these. In 2019, his design came tops as one of the few selected pieces in the Spider Man far from Home contest.
There are very many proficient hands in the eSports design community that would exhaust articles if they were all to be mentioned, but what is largely constant is a higher percentage of them had participated in one of these competitions in times past. Competitions are the mould.
Footnotes
Most great industries started this way, so there is no doubt that even this is filled with as much potential as you can imagine. The key factors are adoption and embrace of their training methods, as well as fine-tuning such where necessary.
There is no shortage of excitement for the potential benefits this would bring for design and creativity.
