Creative Director · Brand / Product / Place / System
Travis Payne.
Twenty-five years of making complex things clear. It started with club fliers in DC basements, ran through Riot Games and a 20-million-player platform, and lately meant rebranding an AI governance company. I design the system, then show you the thinking behind it.
Selected work
The marketing team runs itself now
I used AI to build the tooling and loops that take the tedium out of our marketing week, so the team spends its time thinking instead of doing process work. The interesting decisions are the places I stopped it.
Rebranding for the AI era
Casper Labs became Prove AI in a two-month sprint from first concept to board approval, then rolled out across web, social, and the show floor.
Directing a rebrand from the client chair
We hired JKR to rebuild Casper's identity. I directed the engagement with our CMO, then kept the system honest for years after handoff.
Three years on the Promenade
Branded venues at the World Economic Forum, aligned globally through 3D walkthroughs before a single panel was printed.
Wayfinding for 1,000 Rioters
A meeting-room app with League champions on the door: find the room, read the lore, book it in two taps.
Design at 50,000-page scale
The relaunch grew monthly uniques from 3M to 5.8M. The games channel, and a tablet news app before tablets had rules? Mine, end to end.
The face of 20 million gamers
Full web redesign plus the desktop client's UI. One design language across every surface a player touched.
One director, four surfaces
Brand
Identity systems
Naming support, wordmarks, guidelines that run to 144 pages, and rollouts that reach every last profile picture.
Product
UI & UX
Wireframe to spec to shipped screens: wayfinding apps, tablet news, gaming platforms, enterprise CMS design at scale.
Place
Environments, motion & sound
Venue branding at Davos, booth systems, 3D visualization that aligns global teams, sound design, and 200+ live events behind the console.
System
The machine behind it
Skills that hold a brand to its own rules, pipelines that turn a document into a published page and a page into video, and the weekly loop that ties them together.
1999 → today
Sixteen roles, one throughline: take something complicated and make people get it.
