About the Project

The idea of Premio eSport Brasil was to engage and unite the eSports community in an Oscar's like annual event. I was assigned to be the Design Lead of the project. We launched the first edition in 2017 and we've been having yearly versions of the event ever since. I've been involved from day one up until the 2019 edition. We had a small team of seven people to make this huge project take off.

There has never been anything like it in Latin America. We had very ambitious plans but our brand was unknown to the public, media, and influencers. In a few months, we had to develop the entire concept of the event and raise funds and sponsorships to make it a profitable business.

The Brand

The first step in creating a remarkable event was to start with an inspiring brand to engage and unite our audience. The look and feel of the event was an important piece in developing a memorable experience for all participants (in which winners take huge pride in attending and being part of the awards) and also to motivate and captivate audiences everywhere.

Another key advantage of having a strong brand was that we were viewed as the only player in the market, and represented the entire universe of e-sports awards in Brazil. As newcomers into the market, a solid brand was necessary to built trust. Ultimately, the success of that led to the fact that there's now no competition in terms of e-Sports Awards in Brazil, even though it's a lucrative business to be in.

I was responsible for the creative process that guided us to this final result, including the creation of the logo, its colors, and the typography. You can see below some details of this initiative.

Sales Presentations

To have a financially viable project, we had to invest in closing deals with sponsors. Our goal was to sell our dream of creating the award event and establishing ourselves as a single source of reference for e-Sports Awards in Brazil. We had to craft that inspiration through our sales decks.

As a Design Lead, I was responsible for creating all the sales presentations that led us to have deals with 7 large brands such as Samsung and Domino's.

Our Website

As part of the effort of engaging the participants and the audience, we needed a website. Our main goals with the website were: Our website must be engaging, straight to the point, reliable, and mobile-friendly. Our process to achieve this was:

• Detail all the 20 categories of the award

• Display info about each of the 60 judges

• A clear explanation of deadlines for categories that would have public voting

• Receive votes from visitors

• Expose our master sponsor

As we were dealing with nominees that have thousands (sometimes millions) of followers, I knew that our website would have millions of visitors and compute millions of votes. With such a high engaging audience, we needed to keep up with the high expectations so I decided to partner with a software company to develop the website.

For this process, I was responsible for researching and meeting many potential partners. I closed the deal with one company. We had a tight deadline and high expectations - from shareholders, sponsors, and of course, our audience. I had weekly meetings and we had monthly deliverables to guarantee that everything was on schedule and to engage with our audience through social media.

Our website was delivered on time. It handled 10 million votes and was crucial for the success of the event. Some screenshots of the website:

The Superjúri

The Trophy

For our first year of the event, we decided to outsource the trophy design and manufacturing. Unfortunately, it had a few issues: It was a bit heavy so the participants couldn't hold the trophy and the microphone at the same time; It didn't look good in pictures as it was transparent.

I decided to take over this initiative with the ultimate goal of solving these main issues moving forward. I did the initial design for the new version of the trophy. Then, I hired an agency to build the 3D rendering of my design.

My team loved the design and concept, so I reached out to different suppliers to quote the production of the new trophies. I negotiated and closed a deal with one supplier and we had the same cost per trophy as the year before. In the end, the trophy was one of the highest points of the awards. You can see from the pictures below how much the winners loved it.

The Event

We were a small team (only 7 people in total) and this was the final day - the day we would be engaging with millions of our fans.

The event was broadcasted live by TV Globo - the largest TV Network in Brazil. And of course, our vibrant and highly engaged community was very active on social media (trending topic on twitter during the award: 1st place in Brazil, 3rd in the world). As the head of design, I had to make sure everything related to our visuals, our sponsors, and our online presence was delightful and more importantly - displayed as planned.

As our nominees have millions of followers combined, I realized that this would be a unique opportunity for us to leverage on them to boost our brand. To do that, we needed a beautiful, inspiring video produced on spot and ready to be published in a maximum of 12 hours after the event.

I searched and negotiated with all the best agencies I could find. I closed a deal with one and together we defined the storytelling, visual design, and sound effects. I also had the approval of each of our sponsors that the video matched perfectly their brand visuals.

On the day before the event, we ran a simulation of the video takes. As the event was going to be broadcasted live, I needed to make sure that both teams (the live and video teams) would be able to work at the same time.

The result speaks for itself. I'm really proud of our work!