CEL Season 4 creative pitch
A creative direction for Season 4 that trades heavy texture for clean banners, gradients and motion. Written with Christian Alegam.
Christian Alegam and I pitched how the league should look in Season 4. I stepped down partway through the season for personal reasons, so this is the direction I helped set, not a season I saw through.
- Discipline
- Brand identity, Motion design
- Client
- CESAFI Esports League
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Creative direction proposal, Sample assets
- Tools
- Photoshop, After Effects
What went wrong last season
Heavy film grain and detailed textures looked rich in Photoshop and fell apart on stream. The encoder spent its bitrate on noise and the actual gameplay came out blocky.
The stream and the social posts also looked like two different brands, and the most elaborate designs were slow to rebuild as vMix overlays.
For Season 4, our creative direction is pivoting towards simplicity, clean banners, and gradients, with a priority on motion over intricate detail.
- #FFFFFF White
- #373737 Neutral
- #0600FF League blue
- #03007D Deep blue
- #FB3640 Alt red
Heading Pro for display, Geist and Geist Mono for text and data. Flat colour and smooth gradients compress cleanly on stream.
Sample assets from the pitch, moving.
Thought process
- 01
Look at what broke
For Season 4 we went back to the old streams. Grain and texture looked great in Photoshop and turned to mush after compression.
- 02
Trade texture for motion
Flat colour and clean gradients compress well, so the richness had to come from how things move instead of how they are textured.
- 03
Design for the whole team
Simple banners rebuild quickly in vMix and look the same on stream and on social, so production and publishing finally match.
- 04
Hand it over
I stepped down partway through the season, so the deck was written to stand on its own: rules, do's and don'ts, and samples anyone could build from.
