Emily Marzonie — Creative Direction

Lore & Legends

A visual identity built

for a world of possibilities.

I joined the Lore & Legends campaign as Creative Director with a simple creative challenge: bring all of Runeterra into a library and capture the immersive feeling of getting lost in a book—magical, not musty or dusty.

From that starting point, I worked closely with our Art Director to translate the brief into a visual and motion language that could flex across the campaign. Together, we developed bespoke, highly editable systems for typography, color, illustration, and composition that gave each character, region, and campaign moment its own expression while keeping the world unmistakably Lore & Legends.

Role

Creative Director

TEAM

Riot Games

Year

2025

Type

VISUAL IDENTITY & MOTION KIT

The main challenge of building a branding identity around a campaign with a library setting was finding the balance between context and avoiding association with dated, established brands. No dusty or musty feelings, no overly scripted font. Lore & Legends shouldn't feel like Dungeons & Dragons (even though we love D&D)! So we decided to target the feeling of watching Lord Of The Rings on the big screen for the first time: Wonder, excitement, and a little nerdy energy.

THE CHALLENGE

Bookish yet cool,
like your favorite history professor

We built the identity around a bespoke, illuminated-manuscript-inspired typeface, pulling elements from historical manuscripts while emphasizing the kinetic energy intrinsic to TFT and our Little Legends.

Versatility became the central design principle. The campaign needed to feel like one cohesive world while giving us room to move across Runeterra's many regions, characters, and stories. My Art Director, Audrey Havey, and I developed a color system and visual language that could flex from regional palettes to character-specific treatments, while a set of logo and illustration variations gave the campaign room to evolve without losing recognition.

Celebrating all of Runeterra

THE APPROACH

LEAGUE

NAVY

HEXTECH

BLUE

PARCHMENT

IVORY

KEY ART

Character illustrations were created as complete, adaptable assets rather than locked compositions, allowing characters to be repositioned and recomposed for different formats and campaign needs.

FILIGREE

A family of related filigree treatments carried hidden Easter eggs across the campaign—from full-page compositions and social frames to individual flourishes.

LOGO

Two logo treatments, each designed in both stacked and single-line configurations, gave the identity flexibility across layouts and placements.

CHARACTER ICONS

Region-specific champion icons extended the visual language into character-level details, giving individual champions their own expression within the broader identity.

REGIONAL

Regional color palettes, illuminated-manuscript borders, and styled iconography allowed different parts of Runeterra to feel distinct while remaining part of the same world.

Built to flex.
Built to scale.

THE MODULAR SYSTEM

The Lore & Legends identity was designed as a modular system rather than a single fixed treatment. Each element was built with multiple variations, giving the campaign room to adapt across characters, regions, formats, and moments while maintaining a recognizable visual language.