GAMING ON TIKTOK

Role: Art Director & Designer (under Design Director Ishaan Mishra)

The Brief: With 30 billion+ monthly views on gaming-related hashtags, TikTok's gaming vertical was generating massive cultural momentum — but it lacked a unified visual identity. The Global Brand Studio needed to build a cohesive design system that could represent gaming culture across every touchpoint: social content, B2B campaigns, global events, and experiential activations.

Problem: Gaming on TikTok had energy and experimentation everywhere, but no consistent visual language tying it together. Individual teams were pushing bold ideas that didn't align with one another. The gaming audience is also notoriously savvy — they can spot inauthenticity instantly. Whatever system we built had to feel native to gaming culture, not like a corporate layer pasted on top of it.

Insight: The design system needed to feel like it belonged inside a game — structural enough to scale globally, but with enough personality that it didn't read as sterile. A grid motif could act as the architectural backbone (evoking HUD elements and UI frames), while glass icons brought dimension and a modern aesthetic. Oversized typography delivered the bold, confident voice gaming conversations demand. The system had to read in a two-second scroll and still hold up on a thirty-foot LED stage.

Design Intent: I pitched initial concepts for the look and feel during the early development phase, then iterated and designed with the finalized elements across content, campaigns, and experiential activations. The design language centered on a grid motif as the structural backbone, 3D glass icons for dimension and modernity, and oversized typography for bold presence. I helped scale this system into environmental graphics, event branding, and on-screen applications at major tentpoles including MAU, Gamescom, SXSW, and Tokyo Game Show — where the team fused TikTok's global identity with Japanese matsuri culture through lanterns, happi coats, and festival-style gaming activations. The toolkit was designed to be modular enough that regional teams from Hanoi to Los Angeles could adapt it to their audiences while keeping the core DNA intact.

Outcome: The design system became the foundation for how TikTok presented its gaming vertical globally — across events, summits, sizzle reels, trend reports, partner programming with Variety, and immersive activations like the Lightbox NYC experience and the TikTok Gaming end-of-year celebration at HoneyPot LA. The toolkit scaled across two versions (Sofia Pro, then TikTok Sans) and was deployed at events spanning Tokyo, Cologne, Hanoi, Seattle, San Francisco (GDC), Los Angeles, and beyond. Gaming on TikTok became a recognized platform identity and a major revenue driver for the Global Business Marketing unit.

Extended team: Design Director: Ishaan Mishra. Designers & Art Directors: Joy Seet, Mike Hinson, Eric Schroeder, Vanessa Rizk.