Did you think you wanted to do what you do when you were younger?
Nope. Absolutely not. Also, still don't. :O
Where did you go to school? Was it for your current job?
I studied vocal performance for a year at Simpson College and then moved back to my hometown and went to school at Winona State. I did a semester as a computer science major and ended up with a degree in Broadcast Journalism.
What is your exact title at Riot Games?
Art Lead
How did you begin to work with Riot Games? Did you do an internship there first?
I moved to California with several of my friends - since we all lived together we all played League. It was an automatic five man team. Living the dream. One of them noticed Riot was hiring, and I applied on a whim. I had never considered working in the gaming industry. It didn't seem obvious as a Visual Designer (I was a video editor at the time and wanted to get more into interactive design)
What does your job entail? Can I get some examples of the work you've done at Riot Games? Or examples of your work in general.
I work with lots of artists and try to find new and creative ways to present all of the content in a way that makes sense and will be memorable. I remember the first website I ever designed was for Pulsefire Ezreal... it still holds a special place in my heart :3 It was the first time we created a really custom experience for a new skin. My favorite project was the Shurima website, because we tackled a lot of new things - New tech, new gameplay, new storytelling, new art styles, new web functionality, new, new, NEW, NEW, NEW!!
Recently I've gotten to direct the design of our experiences, helping to define the look and feel of a promotion for a major skin thematic. PROJECT was one of the best examples for that. We did a lot of concept and exploration for what the web experience could look like based on the idea that we were inside Master Yi's brain as he's becoming more and more self aware. I helped give creative direction for the website hoping it would give players a window into an interesting piece of the narrative. I also get to design style guides and brands for new and old skin themes. Everything has a certain level of consistency so that when you see a PROJECT skin or website or video or icon or anything else - you should be able to say, "Hey, that looks and feels like PROJECT!"
I create a lot of mood boards, style guides and paper prototypes o______o Interactive design and being an Art Lead at Riot is more about helping to discover what makes a certain experience unique and finding ways to support that through layout, functionality and illustration.
Do you have any themes in work you've done that you would consider your "go-to design" or idea?
One of the fun parts about being on the skins team as a Visual Designer is that I get to make up a lot of stuff. I could be digging up cheesy, B-Horror film reference one day and cute dragons the next. Sometimes experiences will have similar content, so to a certain extent there is a template for the type of things in a given experience, but we try to find creative executions that highlight the thematic or support the type of conversation around a thematic we think might happen. Where will most players see this? What do they want to know? How will they engage with it? Why should they care? How do we make it useful? All questions that help us design something that - hopefully, everyone gets to enjoy more because we've taken the time to answer these questions~~
Could you give a brief explanation of a day at Riot Games?
- Get coffee
- Discuss poros
- Play games
Well, there's more to a normal day. It's a lot of planning for current projects, future projects and talking about the things we learned from previous projects. Once the planning is done we get to brainstorm and prototype and go really blue sky with crazy ideas for interactive content, which is always really fun. Once we put together a concept for a website or thematic experience it goes through several rounds of feedback with illustrators, copywriters, developers and product owners to make sure we're communicating the ideas in the best way possible!
Personally my favorite time during the day is game time with TeenageMutantNinjaTabi. Holding steady in Bronze, but we'll make it to Silver... probably.
Sorry for the suuuuuuuuuuper late reply. Thanks for finding me :) If you ever want to chat more feel free to message me on Twitter or yell at me the next time you post. I'm not a very timely person, but I'll try to answer these questions as best I can~
[slayer-jinx-wink]
