Legends of Runeterra

Services: Illustration
Illustration & Design: Aaron Johnson & Derek Anderson
Creative Direction: Joel Anderson

The Project

Riot Games is the creator of Legends of Runeterra, which is the card game spin-off of League of Legends. They asked us to illustrate a series of fantasy travel posters for their new expansions. The art was used in social media to promote the new regions that were added to the game in 2020.

The Challenge

They wanted to invoke a feel of travel and wonder, so they gravitated toward the classic WPA style of travel poster art. Riot Games needed us to take what limited visual reference that existed and depict entire scenes from a fictitious world.

The Solution

We explored the existing regions of Runeterra and pored over reference sketches that the game developers provided. We rendered new scenes from our imaginations by combining our ideas with specific direction the game developers gave us. The result was a series of travel posters that felt like our classic National Park posters, but were obviously not from this world!

Concepts

We went into much more detail on our rough sketches than we normally do. It was important to communicate our ideas clearly with the game developers who were the only people in the world who had actually “been to these places.”

The Artwork

The end product is a poster series that transports the viewer into magical, fantastic, brutal, heroic, or terrifying places. The colors, compositions, textures, and lighting in these fantasy travel posters tell a story of adventure and wonder.