Call of Duty League
Call of Duty League ran alongside my Overwatch work, with a lot of the same people on it. It's a different animal though: heavier, harder-edged, a different crowd with a different temperature. The same playbook wouldn't transfer wholesale, so the team and I had to find CDL's own voice instead of recycling what worked next door.
The brief called for a visual identity with real weight, something that matched the intensity the audience came for without tipping into caricature. A combat-adjacent brand turns overdesigned fast if every asset tries to look loud and extreme. And with Overwatch fresh in muscle memory, the constant temptation was to let its solutions bleed across.
Same arc as the league next door. I started in the mix with the other designers, learning the property by building alongside them, then grew into leading that group and eventually into creative lead for the CDL account. Each moment had to read as unmistakably CDL the second it hit a feed, usually with no time to deliberate, so a lot of the job was helping a fast-moving team make that call without me in the room.
The discipline was separation. We treated CDL as its own world, not a darker version of another league, keeping the two firewalled so neither diluted the other: shared rigor, separate identities. The system had to be sharp and fast, but controlled enough that the team could work across social, campaign, and league moments without it collapsing into formula.
Two leagues, two worlds, mostly the same team. The skill wasn't reusing a formula, it was knowing which instincts to keep and which to leave at the door.
The output read as native to Call of Duty: confident and sharp on its own terms, even sitting under the same agency roof, made by many of the same hands, as its sister league.
