Hi everyone!
Waaaay back in August, I told you I was working on a massive CubeCraft project that I wasn't able to reveal yet... Well, it's finally out in the open!
When I originally joined CubeCraft in June, my first major project was to re-brand all of their social media pages. They already had well thought out brand guidelines, (colour scheme, logo, fonts etc.) but it was my job to create various templates and designs that could be used within these guidelines going forward.
Here's an example of me putting these guidelines into practice. Very early on I decided that I needed to produce a number of different backgrounds that could be used in a variety of formats. The most common of these is the 'cubey hill' design seen behind the text. I also decided that when showing off renders of any new characters/objects that a white border should be prominent around them. This was coherent with the fonts that I usually kept white in order to keep them clear and simple.
FAST FORWARD to August and I was set the task of expanding these design styles over to the actual CubeCraft server. I was sent a massive list of every single piece of artwork on the server and asked to re-imagine them with the new CubeCraft brand guidelines. I was also then tasked with updating every single menu icon, which is essential for players to use the Minecraft server properly.
Before anything else, I did some research into what I believed the server currently did well and how it could improve in terms of its design. This is how the server's store looked prior to the update.
This lead me to a couple of conclusions:
- The shop was currently too confusing and messy - needed simplifying.
- The colors assigned to each section of the shop was essential to how the shop worked.
From here I began working on some concepts to pitch to the rest of CubeCraft. Here are some of the initial ideas:
After a huge amount of discussion and changes, we eventually decided on these designs to be used. One represents a pack of accessories that the player can buy, and the other shows all the content available if the player buys a rank.
The menu icons worked in a similar way to the artwork above. Each section such as 'Buddy Packs' had its own unique color and this translated over to the icons too. For icons such as 'add friend' (seen below), I made sure to also keep them simple but different enough that players knew they were more important.
The next step was repeating this for every single existing icon/artwork on the server. An effort that took a very very long time. If I wasn't so lazy I could probably check how many I had to produce... but I am. Here's just a small section of the huge list that was created.
FAST FORWARD to October and after a huge amount of work from the Dev team on CubeCraft the update is finally out. Here's some awesome before and after shots!
Overall I am extremely happy with how the re-brand turned out and so far it's received a great reaction from the gaming community! If you would like to check it out for yourself, simply head onto Minecraft and join the CubeCraft server!
Thank you for sticking with me through this lengthy post. I hope it was somewhat informative about the process behind my work!
Rowan.