Deconstructing twitter giveaway graphics in gaming

June 16, 2017

A few months ago, I was tasked with making a few giveaways graphics for building our social media following at Evasyst. We were relatively fast to the punch on doing this format for this specific game, but there was already a general trend of how to design said graphics in other areas.

After looking at a bit of the competition, it was obvious that they follow a very simple format. There are 3 main elements that compliment the skin being given away.

Flashy title text (the name of the skin in this case)
Thematic accents / background
Directions for entering the giveaway

With this in mind, I started working on the graphics. The first one was... less than ideal. But soon I had a system down. Here's an example with one of my best pieces. It was for a skin called 'Royal Paladin', so I immediately thought of something holy/angelic. I looked up pictures of the character Imperius, an angel from Blizzard's Diablo franchise, and used it heavily as inspiration.

Once you have something to draw off of you just need to look for 3 things when extracting themes from said asset:

Texture for title text background
Another texture or custom effect for the accents
Color scheme that compliment the colors of the content

The metallic texture, angellic wings, and precious metal color scheme was tied altogether here in this character, so it translated really quickly to the graphic.

After a few giveaways, this process would take about an hour from start to finish, once the info came in on what skin we were giving away. With this, we ended up saving boatloads of cash, had we decided to just promote our social prescence through Twitter's official avenues. Each follower cost us about $0.32 to acquire, which is a massive improvement from the average cost per follower of about $2.50-$4.