ROBLOX
Platform
Desktop, Mobile, Console
Role
UX/UI, Branding, Strategy
Timeframe
2018 - Present
Powering imagination

Launch Site

Currently serving as the Principal Product Design Architect at Roblox, where I've made fundamental impact spanning design systems, branding, social identity, creation tools, and digital communication to create a thriving platform for 65M+ daily active users.

I joined Roblox in 2018 - back then, the company had about 250 employees, and the design team was a close-knit squad of 8. During my tenure, Roblox experienced rapid growth: the company went public, its workforce expanded to nearly 3,000 individuals and the design department flourished to over 75 professionals.

The early Roblox faced several design challenges: its brand presented a very young and amateurish image, its platform was rife with inconsistent and unintuitive behaviors, and its information architecture didn’t scale well to accommodate for accessibility or localization. Its platform offerings was also pretty limited back then: core features were fragmented across its mobile apps, website, and XBOX properties, and were completely absent on the desktop app.

Elevating Brand & Establishing a Design System

My design director and I chose to start with the brand content strategy; our intention was to unify our UX user stories from the overarching product narrative. I began by creating guiding principles and formulating the tactical means to achieve them.

I developed design principles and strategy to unite Product and Marketing under one unified brand (Graphics by Amy Liu)

At the time, Roblox had a bold, youthful, and toy-like aesthetic. The brand's color scheme posed challenges; it was overpowering, competed with YouTube's color identity, and its key red color was absent in its product, except in its association for destructive actions like blocking and deleting. The platform's color palette, featuring orange, yellow, blue, and green, closely resembled a child's Lego set, which didn't align with the desired image.

Drag toggle to view: old design in 2018 (left) and my branding refresh in 2019 (right)

I decided to clean the slate, adopting a dark, minimalist color palette to allow our product showcase its content with a cinematic quality. Our branding content also required reevaluation, as the marketing material had relied heavily on Roblox avatars for promotional needs. While these avatars were iconic to the platform, they represented only a fraction of Roblox’s offerings. This also inadvertently limited the perception of Roblox's vast potential, positioning Roblox more as an avatar product than a platform for immersive experiences. Realizing that neither a single image nor a character could capture Roblox’s vast capabilities, I arranged a variety of scenes from Roblox experiences into a tilted grid - an angle inspired by our shortform logo. This approach ultimately became the ubiquitous backdrop for all of Roblox’s branding.

Package designs and gift cards utilizing my branding guidelines

My redesign of the landing page beat out the notorious, metric-stubborn "roller coaster" version (other versions failed for half a decade prior)

I worked closely with the Marketing team to bring all marketing channels into cohesion, and worked with the Business Development team to unify our physical products as well (i.e. toys, gift cards, XBOX packaging, etc.). In March 2021, the company went public, and as our CEO rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, my branding took over the streets of Times Square to celebrate the ocassion.

My branding dominating the streets of Times Square - many thanks to the hardworking Marketing team for pulling this off.

In terms of the logo, our limited resources initially constrained us from conducting an extensive color study, so we opted for a minimalist approach with black. After allowing time for the public to acclimate to these significant changes, I subtly reintroduced color to the shortform logo, the Roblox tilt. Simply white and black was too flat, especially as an icon for a 3D platform. So I used a radial gradient to inject some dimensionality, and I used a satin chrome coloring as both a soft nod to its technical roots. Utimately I wanted it to feel refined and sleek (or "sexy" as noted by our CEO, Dave Baszucki, after seeing the final design). The typography of the ROBLOX logomark remained unchanged, as it was too new to undergo more changes at the time.

Besides the logo, I was also responsible for leveling up other brand trademarks, like the platform’s virtual currency. At the time, Roblox was beginning to set itself up for the international scene, but Robux’s currency too much resembled the currency for Brazil, the real (R$). In addition to this challenge, it also didn't feel iconic or tactile, and felt lazy in its implementation. I set out to create a coin that could be used both as a symbolic mark and as a tangible object in virtual space. I wanted the silhouette to allude to the Roblox shortform logo, the Roblox tilt, so it would feel like they were both from the same family.

Old Roblox currency, Robux (left), redesigned Robux (center), and Roblox's shortform logo (right)

In addition to prepping our currency for the global market, Roblox launched a Chinese version of the platform with Tencent, called LuoBuLeSi 罗布乐思 (a Chinese pronunciation for Roblox, while also meaning “a happy way for learning”). I was responsible for creating its logo - a huge undertaking considering I wasn’t familiar with Chinese characters or how to stylize them. Our CEO, Dave Baszucki, was adamant that the logo needed to represent a utility not a game (Tencent wanted to position Roblox as a game in China), and that it needed to feel akin to the original logomark, enough to be able to lock up together. Many iterations later, I eventually came up with the mark.

Chinese logo showing the structural relationships between the characters, as well as a sneak peek into some of the workshopped ideas, featuring the CEO of Roblox, Dave Baszucki.

More to Come

That's just the tip of the iceberg of all of the awesome things I've done at Roblox. Stay tuned for more case studies!