Zelda Universe

collaborator(s): Connor strickland, Jason rappaport

As creative director for Zelda Universe, I am responsible for ensuring that a team of designers creates high-quality graphic elements for use in various ways on Zelda Universe, while providing input on the layout of the overall site design and helping to maintain its long-standing brand.

Branding has been my main focus as director. ZU had no solid brand direction; they had two assets: a logo, and a digital forest painting from 2005. My first main goal was to update and create a brand guide specifically geared toward non-designers, making it much simpler to guide a team of actual designers working on larger, more significant projects.

The creation of an updated logo was one of my first projects. My collaborator, Connor Strickland and I began drafting potential updates to the logo, focusing on why exactly a new logo needs to be created. At this point in time, the site had two distinct aesthetics—a skeuomorphic stone temple, and everything else—and we needed to create a logo that could bridge between them. A vibrant, skeuomorphic shield was created alongside/on top of the flat logo, for use on the main site while a new, flat site design was developed. Once the stone temple was done away with, we’d be left with a decently modern, well-constructed logo that everyone would already be familiar with.

Social media assets often fall to me. With hundreds of thousands of followers across our many social media platforms, there’s always a need for a new promotional graphic or a new logo for a new YouTube series being launched. This became more like client work—creating disparate graphics for various staffers that all follow the established brand guidelines. They were written rather broadly (deliberately), resulting in an array of graphics that are all recognizably Zelda Universe, but are otherwise different.