AAA Game Brand identity and governance // Visual design // Motion design, film // Product design, UX, UI // Creative direction // Art direction // Typography // Print // E-commerce // Packaging, merch, retail, OOH // Campaigns // Events // More
Crytek & CRYENGINE: Scaling a global gaming powerhouse and its ecosystem.
5+ million downloads: Clean, experience-driven, visually compelling.
Context
Crytek is a pioneer in the AAA gaming space, known for the Crysis series and the powerful CRYENGINE software. As the company grew, its brand identity and governance needed to keep pace with its expanding roster of titles and licensing business.
CRYENGINE is a game development platform developed by Crytek. The new design style (a part of the rebrand) focused on having a cleaner, more streamlined look, that emphasised the graphic-making abilities of CryEngine. This meant bigger, more engaging and eye-catching visuals, minimal text (to avoid language barriers), and smarter interactions that gave solid user feedback.
Challenge
Unify a sprawling ecosystem that included multiple game franchises, a complex B2B game engine, and a global community of developers.
Strategy
Brand Identity and Governance: The strategy focused on creating a cohesive visual language that allowed individual game titles to shine while reinforcing the overarching Crytek and CRYENGINE authority.
Personality and visual design that resonated: Quirky and purposeful animations for gamers and game developers—a much welcomed addition.
What I did
I led the design team, overseeing brand identity, visual and product design, and UI/UX—but also being very hands-on. My role also involved building and scaling the e-commerce experience, packaging, merch, and large-scale event branding.
Outcome
A consistent, high-end brand execution across all touchpoints—from game UI to international events—supporting titles like Crysis 2 & 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, and Hunt: Showdown.
The brand relaunch was also featured on some of the top gamer magazines, e.g. EDGE and Develop. Aside from media advertising, events – including GDC, E3, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, and PAX to name a few – were a very good way to show the new style, reaching the main community of gamers and developers.
I also worked with the in-house game design, marketing, and business development teams, as well as external production houses, to recreate scenes and levels from different games and bring them to life for a different, more engaging user experience for the convention attendees. Doing booths (like below= also gave a clear idea and ‘feel’ to the gamers and media, so they knew what to expect and look forward especially for newly-announced games.
It was important to keep the existing community of users and let them know they were welcomed, understood, and heard.
A part of this included creating a collectable series of shirts that playfully showcased some of the most used features, such as the Tessellated T-Shirt (texture), which meant that the shirts came rumpled or 'manually tessellated', or the witty and self-explanatory Realistic Cloth Simulation.
