Mech_Con was a 2-day Gaming event celebrating the BattleTech universe and Piranha Games MechWarrior titles taking place between 2016 - 2018. This case study, focusing on 2018, is a partial exploration of the design system used for the creation of digital and print media for the event.
The event was an overwhelming success with gaming enthusiasts from around the world gathering to celebrate the BattleTech franchise and Mechs’. The task was to create a scalable brand with event touchpoints existing digitally and physically in the form of a website, merch, game streams, video, advertising, signs and a MechWarrior Online world tournament.
Step one involved updating the logo from Mech_Con 2017 and creating a style-guide. I broke open the sketch pad and ideated on a design, a hexagon, which could be expanded upon in various use case scenarios. The hexagon dovetailed nicely with the event setup using rigs extensively for lights, cameras and the BattleTech board game which famously employs a hexagonal map with Mechs’ strategically placed for combat.
The website was created first for attendee’s to sign-up with print collateral developed in months preceding the event. The style-guide was shared between printers, the event staging firm and marketers allowing for a confluence of supplemental material to be organised with a consistent look and feel.
Custom made player shirts were created for MechWarrior Online tournament teams outside of the Mech_Con brand. The shirts corresponded with the teams’ own logos and represented another design challenge in between the event and tournament branding. Even though each player tee was bespoke, I was still able to add a hex pattern invoking battle hardened chain mail for the design.
A specially designed Mech for the event was created by the Piranha Senior Concept Artist which was factored into the brand at a later point. The central use case for this unique Mech were the event custom tees. The tournament branding while different vis-a-vis the event identity's electric blue, instead using a fire orange as the primary colour, incorporated the hex in the form of a spherized pattern representing the global player network of MechWarrior Online.
In conclusion Mech_Con provided a complex design challenge with numerous variables coalesing on the week prior to commencement. The hexagon proved a useful cornerstone for asset creation reducing design thinking time and speeding up development.