Dice Cup - Rebrand Concept
This is a self-initiated/student project where I re-branded a local business - The Dice Cup, Nottingham's biggest and best board game café with over 500 unique board games to rent and play, and vegan cakes and snacks provided by a local bakery.
Existing Identity
The Dice Cup's existing brand identity is lacking in personality, and feels more like a non-profit community project/youth centre rather than a fun café/board game buisiness.
I believe this is due to the lack of enguagement with tabletop gaming imagery and symbols within their visual vocabulary.
Their main mode of communication these days is online, and visuals in their shop, so I have focused on those aspects
New Identity
The existing logo seen above is fine, but I decided to take it a step further and attempt to make a logo mark that be able to react to users in digital environments in a fun way, while keeping a similar feel
I decided on this design which I feel is the most versatile, the dice can be animated and superimposed onto almost any situation and medium.
The main animation involves the dice rolling randomly between its two axes, with the steam animating the letters "dc".
New Website
For the website, I came up with a system whereby the navigation and content are shown in a way which explicitly references tabletop gaming symbols, primarily, card games. The navigation works by having cards along the bottom (on desktop), and the user can then drag those cards onto the “tabletop” (the page contents), to navigate to that page.
The cards are designed to look worn, since this gives them more personality, and implies use over time, and in turn that The Dice Cup are experts in the 900+ games they have available to play
The goal of the website is for it to feel slightly different evey time you come there, reflecting the variety of games available at the Dice Cup.
The website will have a few select colour schemes, and every time the website is loaded, it will change colour schemes.
Also the cards on each page will have a randomised order.
With the reliance on card game imagery, other kinds of tabletop imagery would be splashed into pages where appropriate, for example, on the weekly events bulletin page, it makes more sense for this to be in the style of scribbled notes.
If you look closely, this is “scribbled” on the back of a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet, a common meme/joke in Dungeons and Dragons groups is that scheduling is a nightmare, so it’s a fun joke for those who get it, and a change of scenery which tells the viewer that the Dice Cup is more than card games.
Having hand written content also gives off a personal feel, while still feeling “designed”
New Menu
Since I had already established the card game theme on the website, it only made sense to continue it into the user expierence for customers inside the shop.
Hence, I redesigned the menu as a deck of 32 cards, including some tropes of popular card games.
They use similar colour scheme to those from the website, but with some changes, mainly on the deck box.