Lead Designer · Art Direction · Motion
Year
2023
Client
dUNGEONS
& dRAGONS
category
gRAPHIC
dESIGN
Product Duration
3 - 4 Weeks
THE CHALLENGE
Planescape is set in Sigil, the city at the crossroads of every plane of existence, a place where a modron, a demon, and a talking rat can share a street corner and nobody blinks. The campaign had to sell that exact feeling: a world where the impossible is ordinary. That meant a visual identity elegant enough to feel otherworldly, flexible enough to hold wildly different creatures and tones, and systematized enough that a full team could produce on-brand work without me touching every asset.
The Design System
I built the campaign's look and feel around a contrast drawn from Sigil itself: refined art nouveau chrome framing wrapped around stained and frosted glass. The chrome gave every placard a crafted, jewel-box structure. The glass let the strange creatures of the multiverse glow and float behind it. Together they read as eccentric and elegant at once, a frame ornate enough to make anything inside it feel like a treasure worth seeing.
Then I turned that look into a toolkit. I documented the system, the frames, glass treatments, type, and the rules for how they combined, so it could be reproduced consistently across the internal team, external partners, and a contract studio brought on for extra capacity. I kicked the project off, onboarded the studio to the toolkit, and reviewed their first assets closely to make sure the system held before it scaled.
Commissioned Illustration
Shemeshka the Marauder. Planescape has no single hero. The player characters are as varied as the multiverse, which makes them nearly impossible to anchor an ad around. So I directed the key art toward the book's antagonist instead. I wrote the creative brief, sourced and vetted illustrators, selected the artist, and directed the piece through revisions, coordinating with the D&D studio to keep Shemeshka canon-consistent. The result frames her as a formidable, authoritative presence daring the audience to take her on.
The Glitch Characters. The book introduces "glitch" characters who reincarnate as new versions of themselves when they die. To make an abstract mechanic legible in a single image, I directed a piece showing three characters of different races and classes intertwined by a shared motif, so a viewer reads "these are the same soul, remade" without opening the rulebook. I ran the same process end to end: brief, artist selection, direction, studio review, and managing the commission through delivery.
Motion
To extend the identity into video, I designed and animated custom lower thirds, dynamic backgrounds, and end cards for the live-talent "First Look" videos, carrying the chrome and glass language into motion so the campaign felt like one piece across every format.
Why It Worked
The through-line here was judgment as much as craft: knowing that an elegant frame could unify a chaotic multiverse, and that the smartest way to market a game with no fixed hero was to point the audience at its villain. The system I built let a whole team produce that vision consistently, and it taught me the full arc of directing creative work, from a blank brief to a paid, delivered piece of art.
