GEEX
GEEX, or Gaming Esports Expo, is UCLA’s flagship gaming event celebrating the passionate gaming community. I built the visual identity of GEEX from the ground up for our inaugural launch in April 2025 and designed:
t-shirts and tote bags for merch
flyers and posters for print marketing
digital assets for registration pages and any online platforms
social media graphics
animations for our Twitch broadcast team
Furthermore, I led event logistics for our Artist Alley. The event was a ton of fun and I'm excited to see what the next student designer does with GEEX's branding!
ROLE
Brand Designer
CATEGORY
Work / Community / Personal
TOOLS
TEAM
Esports Director Sunny Yen
Marketing Nelson Lee
Logistics Julianna Dy, Kaela Guzman
Broadcast Aaron Zhang, Sydney Tanimitsu, Ethan Lim
Design Yeon Nam, Ella Chen
Photo Video Wendy Tong
📚 JUMP TO
Click these section bookmarks or scroll to view the different parts of my process!
🎨 STYLE GUIDE
With GEEX being a brand-new event, our team needed to establish a bold and exciting brand presence that would appeal to both competitive gamers and casual fans—while also standing out in the saturated world of gaming visuals.
We aimed for a design system that felt playful and modern, capturing the vibrant, futuristic spirit of the gaming community. After curating a moodboard filled with Y3K-inspired visuals and electric neon tones, I chose to anchor the GEEX palette around a bold, neon pink as the core accent color.
moodboard
GEEX Pink
#F44B91
Lavender
#A177FE
Midnight
#070B14
Navy
#0E1223
White
#FBFBFF
final color palette
For the typography, I wanted to capture a futuristic aesthetic. Zorque, with its rounded, digital-inspired letterforms, instantly conveyed a sense of approachability.
That said, Zorque's stylized nature made it less suitable for long-form reading—so I reserved it primarily for the logo and occasional headlines. To provide balance and enhance readability, I introduced TAY Tommy Tokyo. Its structured form contrasts Zorque’s softness, making it ideal for subheadings and key information.
To round out the system, I selected Work Sans as the primary body text. Its clean, rounded design complements both Zorque and Tommy Tokyo, while maintaining clarity and legibility for longer paragraphs and smaller text sizes.
💡LOGO IDEATION
The UCLA Esports and Gaming team was set on incorporating a bear into the GEEX logo: a nod to the university’s mascot and a way to subtly honor UCLA without using the traditional blue and gold.
I explored both type-centric and icon-driven logo concepts, sketching out a wide range of ideas. From there, I selected a few of the strongest directions and developed them into more refined drafts with Adobe Illustrator.
FEEDBACK
While the team appreciated the logo’s typography, they felt the Joy-Con concept was overused in gaming branding and lacked originality. Personally, I was drawn to the gradient bear logo, but I recognized that its facial features were getting lost due to low contrast—especially at smaller sizes or from a distance. With that feedback in mind, I moved forward with two key questions in mind:
How can I design a logo icon that remains bold and recognizable across different backgrounds and sizes?
And how can I make the typography visually dynamic without relying on distortion or effects that compromise legibility?
logo sketches
💯LOGO FINALIZATION
The final GEEX logo features a custom wordmark based on the Zorque typeface, which I refined in Illustrator to strike a balance between visual intrigue and letterform clarity.
The logo icon—Cub Cube—is a reimagined version of my original bear sketch, now housed within an isometric cube and rendered in high-contrast colors for better visibility. I chose the cube shape because it's inherently tied to tech and gaming: pixels, 3D models, and countless machines all use cube-based design language.
There are two main logo variations:
A primary lockup with the required subheader "Gaming + Esports Expo" as specified by UCLA Recreation.
A compact version where the wordmark sits neatly on the cube’s white face—ideal for smaller or more constrained uses.
Thanks to its geometric form, the logo holds up well across all GEEX brand colors. The negative space and cube structure work together to let the viewer’s eye naturally complete the shape, ensuring recognizability without needing multiple color versions (which also saves me a ton of busywork—no color variations needed 🤭).
👕 MERCH
final shirt design
shirt design
🤔 WHAT I LEARNED
I love planning and running events! One of the biggest reasons is the creative variety: designing for events means thinking across multiple mediums and disciplines, which constantly keeps me on my toes.
More importantly, design feels most fulfilling to me when it contributes to real experiences. With events like GEEX, I get to help create spaces where gamers, creatives, and all kinds of nerdy folks can come together and build genuine community.
Working on-site for large-scale events has also taught me how to thrive under pressure. Things will go wrong (they always do!), and when that happens, you can’t just wait for someone else to step in—you have to take initiative and problem-solve on the fly.
And of course, none of this would be as rewarding without the people. The SEC team has been incredible—driven and self-motivated. Being surrounded by that kind of energy has honestly been one of the highlights of my college experience.
