Enter the Arena
Founded in 2018, Mobile Premier League (MPL) is one of India's largest eSports and mobile gaming platforms with growing presence in South-East Asia, USA and Europe. By the beginning of 2022, MPL had expanded its base with over 90 million registered users across India, Asia, Europe and North America.
Codesign’s partnership with MPL to build a comprehensive brand identity programme was initiated in 2020 at the threshold of its explosive growth phase, maximising the potential of a strong and dynamic identity for brand building.
Scope
Brand Identity System—including Visual, Motion & Sonic Identity.
Solutions—Unlocked by identity
The brand identity system for MPL works to solve multiple challenges pertinent to the sector, its own life-stage and ambitions.
- True to its core: The identity system brings alive the exciting & energetic spirit of the brand that is inherent & authentic to its experiences, ambition & culture. The investment in building a strong own-able identity was also important to support MPL’s foray into new markets & verticals over time.
- Correcting aggregator perception: The identity system helps MPL establish its presence as an organised platform for gaming & entertainment, correcting the common perception in the category of brands as unorganised aggregators.
- Establishing cues for trust: Consistent & cohesive expressions, guided by the new identity system, not only strengthen recall but also cue attention to quality and control—to help establish trust amongst users, especially in the context of real-money gaming.
- Adaptability for rapid deployment: With intelligent adaptability the identity system enables creative teams across locations, to create impactful communication & experiential touchpoints rapidly, without losing overarching brand character.
The Approach—Identity as behaviour
We distilled the driving emotion for the brand identity into Josh, Junoon, Jeet (a medley of Fervour, Passion, Victory)—that captured the constant thrill of play and celebration of achievement. An integrated toolkit of assets were designed to express this collective energy, by how they behaved—visually, through motion and sonic quality. The behaviour-led approach enabled greater flexibility in combining and adapting different assets to create immersive canvases for content.
Interested in the idea of Identity as Behaviour? Here's a podcast where co-founder Mohor talks more about it.
Details from the Identity System
Key brand device: The Epicentre
The Epicentre is the key brand device, inspired by an outward burst of energy radiating from a central arena of play, with continuously pulsating action. With a set of guiding principles, the Epicentre can change form, scale & orientation to adapt to varying content and formats.
Colour
The high-contrast & intense colour palette for MPL activates its energetic content. A combination of 3 primaries—Epic Red, Hyper Pink & Hot Purple—created an ownable spectrum for the brand, along with pure White, Space Blue & Laser Green to act as backgrounds and highlights. The colour strategy involved fine-grained guidelines including a preference for white backgrounds for acquisition-first touchpoints to cue higher degrees of transparency and trust, and darker backgrounds for more playful retention-focussed communication.
Typography
Inspired by sports & gaming genres, the brand font for MPL is designed to be used boldly. Visual treatments like the live Ticker format, and pulsating animations were used to amplify urgency and add zing to the messaging.
Image-making
Bold forms and application of the characteristic palette were used to build stronger brand ownership for images, illustrations & icons.
Motion Behaviour
The motion behaviour brings alive the MPL brand assets by accentuating the epicentre’s inherent outward burst of movement and adding a pulsating action that syncs perfectly with the energetic rhythm of the sonic identity.
Sonic Identity
For on-screen experiences, the MPL sonic identity brings more emotion and stronger recall through the sense of sound. The rhythm of the sonic identity is set at a higher BPM to match the rhythm of the human heart in thrilling action. With a catchy beat and tempo, it evokes the irrepressible joy of a victory dance, a shared celebration with high energy.
Brand Hub
We built a brand portal to empower brand teams across locations & verticals to create and collaborate—efficiently and with consistent brand impact. The hub includes ready to use assets, demonstration of guidelines, quick-start templates, and features to allow showcase and sharing of noteworthy executions between teams.
Team
Rajesh Dahiya, Mohor Ray, Siddharth Nair, Videet Desai, Ritwick Nandi, Nikhil Ranganathan, Vishnu M Nair, Shreeya Kurien, Addikt (Motion & Sonic support)
