New Paltz Smash Club

As the lead designer for New Paltz Smash Club, I have been a part of it for multiple years and I have a lot of works to show for it. The club primarily runs weekly and monthly events for the game Super Smash Brothers, allowing visitors from even outside the college to come. I have helped them to attain a stronger design style for their monthly and weekly tournaments and used that branding to further the clubs recognition among the wider Mid-Hudson gaming scene.

Logo Redesign

One of the first and biggest things I did for the club was a total overhaul of the logo. I combined the Smash Brothers series iconic Smash Ball with New Paltz's own branding logo and used colors from New Paltz's branding to form the logo. It is important to indicate that this is a club at New Paltz since people outside of the school would also be coming to the events. Here you can see both the icon version of the logo and the longer logotype.

Monthly Event Promotion

I also made promotional posters, logos and event pages for their monthly events held three times per semester. Each of these monthly events have their own style tied to the games being played at each event. You can see four of my favorites here:

I'd like to use that last one to elaborte on the process for making an event like this as this one was my personal event that I ran with them. I handled the design of the entire event from top to bottom so let discuss all of the material I made for it.

Event Design

Designing for an event like this requires a few unique things to be made. The first things you can see here are an event Icon and an event Banner. These both come together on the...

The next thing to consider for an event like this is the stream layout. For events like this being streamed its important for information to be conveyed to the viewer live in a way that doesn't make them miss out on information or else they couldnt tell what was going on. You can see my stream layout in use here along with a transition I made to switch between scenes, you can see the full recording of the stream...

For promotional material alongside the poster I also made an announcement video to do further promotion for people who otherwise wouldnt be present in person to see the announcement, I used a combination of character modeling, shading, and rendering in Blender and then edited it in DaVinci Resolve. You can see the finished video here:

And lastly I made special pins to give out to people that attended the event! Winners of the individual events that were held also recieved individual pins along with prizes.

I'm proud to say that I truly made this mark on this club. From redesigning their logo from the ground up to defining the style for some of our most popular events to date. Smash Club grew during my time at college from hosting 8 player events every week when I started to now hosting 20 player weekly events and 40 player monthlies. A big part of that was promoting these events to new people and my contributions towards that cannot be understated.