LCS Youtube
Riot Games | League Championship Series | Graphic Designer | 2023-2024
As a Creative Services Designer, a lot of publishing content comes my way. Once word got around that fans enjoyed my YouTube thumbnails, thumbnails for all kinds of content one-offs and smaller series videos were requested, often times with same-day turnaround. It's always a fun challenge to whip up something that is both memorable and performs well for the LCS channel.
The Prudential Job skit was one of the few videos where I was given more than a day to design the thumbnail. Using the extra hours, I wanted to craft something that lived up to the cinematic style the video was going for. With heist movie posters as inspiration, I crafted a stylized Rockstar's GTA-esque look for the photos. The thumbnail design was incredibly popular with the team at Riot and with fans.
Are You Smarter Than
One of the smaller series is Are You Smarter Than (An LCS Analyst / An LCS Caster / An LCS Player). Like all the other thumbnails for The Dive or Catching Up With Doublelift, the show only had still frames to pull from in order to get good expressions. I would typically present a multitude of options for producers to choose from -- sometimes, in order to meet trends and storylines, a less expressive but popular player was selected for the thumbnail.
Below you can see an example of a still frame that was pulled, then scaled up rough version and the final polished, upscaled version.
