My role with DreamHack Melbourne 2024 aimed to expand its visual branding to boost event awareness, promote ticket sales, and enhance merchandise and on-site activations. As one of ESL Gaming’s flagship events, it attracted 35,000+ attendees and required a strong, cohesive brand presence across multiple platforms.
Background
The DreamHack Brand 🔎
This six-month opportunity involved working on the marketing strategy, social media content, and on-site activations. I collaborated with the marketing, product, and broadcast teams to develop creative assets that supported event promotion and ensured a seamless visual identity across digital and physical spaces.
However, roughly two months before the festival, there was a shift in priorities with increased requests from the product team. This required designing on-site branding activations, ensuring a seamless experience for attendees.
○ Campaign visuals for digital marketing, email, and SEO.
○ OOH (Out-of-Home) assets such as billboards, transit ads, posters.
○ Social media assets optimized for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X.
○ Physical signage & banners to guide attendees and enhance the event space
○ Branded activations print products
○ On-site social media prompts
Responsibilities
Maintaining Brand Consistency Across DreamHack Global 🏷️
DreamHack Melbourne 2024 followed global DreamHack branding guidelines, requiring strict consistency while adapting to local market needs. The event’s key themes—vibrancy, celebrating gaming in all forms, and warped reality—needed to be reflected across all visual assets.
View the DreamHack toolkit
"The event’s visual identity emphasized bold typography, dynamic layouts, and vibrant orange tones, aligning with the warped reality theme."
- DreamHack Key Theme
Overview of DreamHack Melbourne Visuals and Brand Consistency throughout my time in this role.
One of the early design challenges was balancing WCAG accessibility with the existing brand elements, leading to multiple layout iterations to ensure both compliance and visual appeal.
Balancing WCAG Accessibility
A key challenge was maintaining high visual impact while ensuring readability and accessibility. To tackle this:
○ Adjusted photo placement and contrast levels for legibility.
○ Ensured text hierarchy was clear
○ Used high-contrast color pairings to enhance clarity without compromising the vibrant DreamHack aesthetic.
Photo-Driven Visual Appeal
A key branding approach was to leverage event photography instead of static backgrounds, making assets feel dynamic, immersive, and engaging. This helped capture the energy of past DreamHack events, reinforcing the festival atmosphere and encouraging ticket sales.
Asset Creation & Workflow Optimization 🔀
All assets were designed using Adobe Creative Cloud, with templates developed to streamline marketing campaigns and ensure consistency across multiple deliverables. Assets were optimized for:
To streamline last-minute requests and enable collaboration across teams, Canva was used for quick-turnaround assets, allowing non-design teammates to make edits without relying on Adobe Creative Suite. This improved workflow efficiency, especially in high-pressure moments leading up to the event.
Designs that adapted Canva focused on simple layouts and adjusting towards specific content. For example, Panel guests, Scheduling across different touchpoints of Melbourne Precinct Parks.
Design Execution
DreamHack Branding Deliverables ✍
Throughout the six-month project, I created 200+ assets across digital, print, and on-site branding. Key highlights included:
○ Large-scale billboards, a custom-designed mural, and OOH media to enhance citywide visibility.
○ Multi-platform marketing visuals optimized for social media, email, and SEO.
○ On-site signage and branding activations, ensuring a cohesive event experience.
Below is a showcase of the graphic design work across the board.
Desktop-sized variants 16:9 ratio
Square-sized variants 1:1 ratio
Phone-sized variants 9:16 ratio
OOh digital assets
Email, Banners and SEO assets
Additional assets used for on-site
Contribution & Impact
Event Growth and Audience Reach 📈
DreamHack Melbourne 2024 saw a 37% attendance increase, growing from 25,851 in 2023 to 35,513 attendees.
Stats for DreamHack Melbourne Attendees 2023 - 2024
25,851 Attendees
35,513 (37% ⬆️ attendance increase)
My work directly supported this growth by:
Key Takeaways
Lessons Learned 💡
DreamHack Melbourne 2024 was my first large-scale event project, and working with ESL Australia provided invaluable insights into strategic marketing and brand consistency. I gained a deeper appreciation for how branding serves as the backbone of engagement, ensuring a unified and immersive experience across all channels.
This project pushed me to refine my expertise in:
One of the biggest hurdles was working with brand colors and accessibility, particularly balancing light-colored fonts on bright, vibrant photography. Additionally, learning how to structure layouts effectively across multiple requests took practice and iteration over time.
⭐ Experience on Large-Scale Event Design has taught me:
○ Visual hierarchy is crucial—at this scale, people scan, not read! The clearer the message, the stronger the impact.
○ Photography is a powerful storytelling tool—leveraging dynamic images from previous events captured the energy and excitement of DreamHack, making assets more engaging.
This project was an incredible learning experience, and seeing my work contribute to the success of DreamHack Melbourne was deeply rewarding.