KEYS FROM THE GOLDEN VAULT
Lead Designer · Art Direction · Motion
Year
2023
Client
dUNGEONS
& dRAGONS
category
gRAPHIC
dESIGN
Product Duration
2-3 Weeks
THE CHALLENGE
Keys from the Golden Vault is a heist anthology for Dungeons & Dragons, a set of self-contained scores for players to plan and pull off. The challenge was selling the fantasy of the heist itself: the elegance, the precision, the glamour and tension of a genre that carries its own visual language. I was handed a creative brief and asked to build the entire campaign's look from it, and to execute the whole thing on my own.
The Design System
To sell a heist, I went where heist stories already live in the culture. I pulled motifs from decades of heist films and crime glamour and landed on art deco: the vault-and-gold, Gatsby-era language of wealth, precision, and high-stakes cool. I built the campaign identity around ornate golden filigree, art deco geometry, and deep gem tones, a look sophisticated enough to feel like a caper and flexible enough to frame very different adventures.
Then I turned it into a toolkit. I designed versatile art deco backgrounds and modular golden details so a full run of marketing materials could be produced consistently and at pace. And on this campaign I executed every asset myself, from the system design through final delivery, so the look stayed exact from the first placard to the last.
Motion
I extended the identity into motion, animating the art deco system into title reveals and campaign spots so the look moved as well as it sat still. For the Calling Cards sequence I worked with a staff storyboarder to develop custom art, then designed and animated it into the piece, carrying the gold-and-geometry language all the way through.
Why It Worked
The win here was translation and ownership. I took an abstract promise, "you are pulling a heist," and gave it a visual language an audience already understands, then built a system disciplined enough to carry it across an entire campaign. And I did it end to end, alone, from a brief to a finished, shipped body of work.
