The Game Box is a chain of arcades that required a big makeover of all of the visuals in the locations. Over the years they had acquired a new corporate identity, but not all of their visuals had adapted to that just yet. A lot of old materials of poor quality were still being used and were in need of some major updates.


The biggest and thus first part of this was the informational slides that are being played in each location. They consisted out of stretched images, poor image quality and there was no consistency to be found. To make it suit the new corporate identity and make it look more professional it had to be completely redesigned.

This project came with a lot of trial and error since there was a new corporate identity but there were no design documents that explained how to work with it. I had to start from the bottom and go off of the few things that had been made in the desired style so far.

So I started by making some example layouts that could be used for each category. I decided that a distinction between categories was necessary to make clear what kind of information people are reading, and to make news or special offers stand out more. Initially the intention was to use a different colour scheme and layout for each category but since both of them were very different it lost the feel of consistency.

As for style, there was no desire for a retro gaming look: there was a strong preference for a clean and modern look which had to be created with the main corporate colours. Black in combination with specific hues of pink, purple and blue (as a strong contrast) were the strongest elements which had to be implemented.

Some of the older designs were of better quality and more recently made, so I took inspiration from those to come up with new concepts. These designs were very obviously inspired by the new corporate identity, since they used the right colours and desired clean style. They also had a photo implemented as a big element of the style. I tried to keep the layout in mind, so that the older modern designs wouldn’t be entirely different and unusable.


After a lot of prototyping and revisioning on details the designs for the slides were up to date and of quality and a request for designing stickers came up. Two types of stickers were required. These were stickers that would be put on the games to relay information about the tickets and amounts of credits the player would get for paying once. It had to be a simple but noticeable design, so the best option would be to go with an all-black design. Every single game has many flashy colours, so no colour besides black would stand out enough. The stickers had to be flexibly usable, though, since the numbers on them would get filled in by anyone, but it would still have to be neat and readable. This made me go for a LCD font. This type is used on the the price tags for the prizes in the arcade, so anyone can fill in the prices and update it by themselves when necessary.


I also got to modernize the iconography. Of course, as a company that is all about games, they have some typical icons at their disposal to emphasize the playfulness of their brand on different platforms. However, these were also very dated in their design and didn’t suit the new clean style they were going for. De design didn’t have to exactly change, but rather needed to be modernized so that they could be used in new locations again. This was easily done by removing the different colours in each of the blocks and shapes and just making them one solid colour. This is a flat design style, which feels more like it fits in with the current trends.


By my own initiative I also designed a template with which information could be relayed to guests by means of a pamphlet, in case people directly need to know specific information. This could be used in situations of instructions or technical difficulties, since it requires more text or a more direct approach than is preferred on a tv slide. It did need to be easily editable, since in the future other people need to be able to provide information in the same presentation quality. I decided to go for a simple black frame with the logo on it and an empty white space in the middle, using a specific font to write the text with. Since some keywords would stand out more by getting highlighted, I decided to make use of negatives, instead of using colours (which would break the style) to reach the desired effect. So for the words that are of essence in the text I create a simple black rectangular shape, place it behind the word that needs to be highlighted, and change the text colour of that to white. This is also something that could be recreated fairly easily. I created a portrait and a landscape variant of this template, because both could be more practical depending on where it would be placed.


As a result of all the changes in terms of visuals I got to write a lot for the Corporate Identity. It was obvious that to keep the graphic design department of high quality no matter who is in charge of it, a lot of design rules needed to be written down and explained with examples. So we made a Design Guide for The Game Box where all the design choices were presented and explained, followed by examples of how to use it correctly to keep everything consistent.


Last but not least, the most recent little project I got to take part in for The Game Box was Halloween. As a team me and my coworkers had made a full plan of how we wanted to celebrate it with guests as an event. In our eyes, a company providing a service and products considered a typically American thing couldn’t possibly skip out on doing anything for Halloween. We wanted to decorate the place, go to work dressed up, and got an approved plan to have a raffle for people that came in costume and for kids to win something extra for free. To promote this, I created a little video that we could present at the location in the week leading up to the Halloween weekend. I decided to keep it in the style of the slides that I had designed and to edit it a little bit to add some spooky effects.