*Disclaimer: this is a personal project, and I am not affiliated with Bungie and have not worked on Destiny 2 in any capacity*
For this project, I wanted to demonstrate my ability to create a high-quality and engaging marketing email for my favorite video game, "Destiny 2" in the form of a "recap email" for the current season, as of this post writing.
This content would be intended for either a lapsed player who plans to return to the game before the end of the season, players who took a break after the conclusion of the seasonal story but plan to play again once the next season starts, or brand-new players who want to be caught up on the activities and story beats of the current season.
Once I knew who the target audience for this marketing material would be, I began by brainstorming content ideas for the concept and documenting each on a piece of sketch paper. At first, I avoided thinking about hierarchy and focused purely on generating ideas so that I could think freely without concern for where it might be placed but once I was finished, I could start arranging them in an order that gave the viewer enough context before each piece of content.
Once I had a rough outline created, it was time to start generating some content. I created a Google Document and laid out each of the content sections I wanted in the order in which they should appear.
Next up, it was time to begin designing. Since it was my goal to match Bungie's design language as best as possible, I opted to create a mini "style guide" by collecting font families, font size values, buttons, icon assets, footer text, images, ESRB rating, etc. from either past Destiny 2 emails I've received from Bungie or other forms of marketing communication like the Season of the Risen marketing site.
I also created my own color palette to use for the project by downloading several high-quality Season of the Risen images from the marketing website and using the eyedropper in Photoshop to select colors I felt appeared consistently or best represented the branding of the season. While I did not end up using all, this gave me a good starting point for adding color to my work.
For any assets which I could not obtain directly online, I made myself. For example, an SVG of the "Risen" icon and a pattern that appears on the seasonal weapons / armor set.
After that, I created a first version of my layout. Since I had already spent the time to create my mini "style guide" and a rough outline for the project, it was a fairly straight forward process and went very quickly. I did identify some issues with my original outline quickly once I began to work in Photoshop, namely the three column layout for the "Character Spotlight" section which just wouldn't fit well at the smaller email width.
One of the most challenging parts of the project were both making sure that the gradients I used were consistent and the process of masking out the Warlock character for the "Enter the Mindscape" section since the visual effects near its helmet are a very thin weight and I needed to be delicate while working around it.
